Years-old footage of coffin case in South Africa falsely shared as visuals of Sudan crisis
- Published on November 14, 2025 at 03:02
- 3 min read
- By Akshita KUMARI, AFP India
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After Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces captured the army's stronghold in the western city of El-Fasher in late October 2025, social media posts shared an old video falsely claiming it shows Islamic extremists burying a Christian man alive. The video first appeared in 2016 news reports about white farmers who forced a black man into a coffin in South Africa.
Graphic Content
"Innocent Christians are being buried alive by Islamic terrorists in Sudan," reads part of a Facebook post shared on November 3, 2025.
Clip included with the post shows a man crouching inside a coffin, wailing as another man forces the lid down down his head.
Content warning
The video surfaced online as Sudan's army and a paramilitary group engage in a power struggle that has been going on for more than two years now.
Fighting has raged since April 2023, pitting the forces of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against those of his former deputy, RSF commander Mohammed Hamdan Daglo (archived link).
The RSF captured El-Fasher, the army's last major stronghold in western Darfur on October 26. The takeover was accompanied by reports of mass killings, sexual violence and looting, triggering international condemnation.
The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions to flee their homes, as recent clashes spread to new regions, raising concerns of an escalating humanitarian disaster (archived link).
Islamophobic comments on the clip, shared in similar Facebook and X posts, suggest users believed the claim was genuine.
"They must be dealt with very soon; Islam is a threat to the world," one user wrote.
Another commented: "Cruel foreign invading religions should be reviewed and banned."
But the video is old and predates the ongoing crisis in Sudan.
Unrelated incident
Reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the clip found the same video uploaded on the YouTube channel of China Global Television Network on November 18, 2016 (archived link).
The video is titled, "White South African men force a black man into a coffin."
The clip was shared on the media outlet's verified Facebook page with the same caption (archived link).
Content warning
The footage was also embedded in a report published by media organisation Al Jazeera that said two white men in South Africa were charged with assault after footage emerged showing them forcing a black man into a coffin and threatening to set him on fire (archived link).
Willem Oosthuizen and Theo Martins Jackson pleaded not guilty over the incident that took place in the eastern province of Mpumalanga, saying they only intended to scare Victor Mlotshwa after he allegedly stole copper cables from their farm.
But a South African judge found the two white farmers guilty of attempted murder, AFP reported on August 25, 2017 (archived link).
The pair had been sentenced to 16 and 19 years in October of the same year but the Supreme Court of Appeal cut their jail term in 2019 (archived link).
South Africa is beset by deep-rooted racial inequality even after the end of white-minority rule in 1994 and racist incidents regularly erupt on social media.
AFP has debunked misinformation spreading in India stemming from political crisis elsewhere in the world here and here.
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