Egypt kidnapping video falsely shared as sectarian violence in south India city
- Published on January 17, 2024 at 08:58
- 3 min read
- By Devesh MISHRA, AFP India
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The video was shared with the false claim on the social media platform X here on January 5, 2024.
It shows men entering an elevator and appearing to drug two girls who then lose consciousness. The men proceed to carry them out of the lift.
The post's Hindi-language caption reads in part: "Bengaluru, Karnataka: See how jihadis abducted Hindu girls from a lift by using chloroform to make them unconscious before putting them inside a car parked in the parking lot driving away."
The term "jihad" is frequently translated as holy war but "jihadist" is frequently used by hardliners in Hindu-majority India as a pejorative term for Muslims.
Similar false posts have been shared elsewhere on X here as well as on Facebook here and here.
These posts also say the incident happened in Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka state currently ruled by the opposition Congress party whom critics often accuse of being pro-Muslim and anti-Hindu.
AFP has repeatedly debunked misinformation targeting the Congress party here, here and here.
Video from Egypt
An analysis of the video shared in the posts shows a watermark visible throughout the clip that reads, "See trending information".
A keyword search of this phrase on Instagram found the video was posted on a page with the same name on December 23, 2023.
Under the post, one Instagram user commented the "video is of Egypt" and said they had seen it reported online by a Middle Eastern newspaper.
Using these details, AFP found multiple news reports in English and Arabic here, here, here and here which state the video was filmed in Egypt (archived links here, here, here and here).
The reports say the incident was related to a family dispute, and the girls in the elevator had been ordered kidnapped by their father.
Egypt's Ministry of Interior, the government body responsible for law enforcement in the country, released a statement on X on December 20, 2023 with more details about the video (archived link).
The Arabic-language statement says the mother of the two girls -- a resident of Nasr City in Egypt's capital Cairo -- filed a complaint against her former husband over the incident on December 13, 2023.
According to the statement, the woman told authorities she had legal custody of her daughters but her ex-husband had taken the children against her wishes.
"During the investigation, it was revealed that the father of the two girls enlisted the help of two individuals to carry out the incident depicted in the video clip," it goes on to add.
The men were apprehended and admitted to colluding with the father "in exchange for a sum of money".
The statement says the father left the country with one daughter on the same day, and that Egypt's public prosecution office had since assumed control of investigating the case.
The same statement was also shared on the verified Facebook account of the interior ministry here on December 20, 2023 (archived link).
Both posts from the ministry contain a screenshot that matches a frame in the video falsely shared online, as shown in the comparison below:
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