Video does not show Pakistani judge presiding over Imran Khan's illegal marriage case

The video shows Rawalpindi resident Chaudhry Asad, also known as "Papu Patwari", throwing cash towards a woman dressed in white as she dances in a large hall.

"This is the honourable judge who has to give the verdict in the iddat case," read an Urdu-language caption alongside the video shared on X on May 29.

The post -- viewed more than 394,000 times -- referred to a judge presiding over Khan's "illegal marriage" case. Similar posts were shared across TikTok and X.

Khan was handed a seven-year jail sentence for breaking Islamic law by marrying his third wife Bushra Bibi too soon after her divorce. 

The conviction centred on an Islamic law known as "iddat", which dictates that a widowed or divorced woman must wait three months before remarrying. Khan and his wife have filed appeals against the verdict from prison.

Local fact-checking organisations Geo Fact Check and iVerify debunked the claim in the false posts, identifying the man as Asad through a series of online searches (archived links here and here).

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A screenshot of the false post on X.

AFP contacted Asad by phone, who said the footage in the false posts showed him at an event.

"Yes, the video is of me. It is quite an old video," he said.  

Keyword and reverse image searches of the video's keyframes on Google also found the same footage shared on TikTok on May 2 by a fan account that used a version of Asad's name (archived link). 

The screenshot comparison below shows the video in the false posts (left) and the footage shared by Asad's fan account (right):

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Screengrab comparison of the false video (left) and the original video (right).

Similar footage of the same event was shared earlier on April 27 by the YouTube channel Gill InfoTech (archived link). It shows the same man with the female dancer but with a wide camera shot angle. 

AFP's court reporter Saqib Bashir also confirmed that the man in the dancing video was not Judge Shahrukh Arjumand, who presided over Khan's case when the posts were published. 

A LinkedIn post shared by Adil Aziz Qazi, the vice chairman of the Islamabad Bar Council (IBC), included a picture of Judge Arjumand (archived link).

Below is a screenshot comparison of the man in the false posts (left) and the image of Judge Arjumand circled in red (right): 

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Screenshot comparison of the man in the false posts (left) and the image of Judge Arjumand circled in red (right)