This footage has circulated in media reports about an assault in Malaysia in 2016

This article is more than one year old.
Published on July 20, 2020 at 06:40
2 min read
By AFP Pakistan

Footage of an assault has been shared repeatedly in multiple posts on Facebook and Twitter alongside a claim it shows a Chinese engineer beating a Pakistani driver for falsifying petrol bills in the Pakistani city of Karachi. The claim is false; the video has circulated since at least 2016 in reports about an assault in Malaysia; the men in the footage can be heard speaking Malay and wearing a shirt that bears the logo of a Malaysian electoral campaign.

The video was published on Facebook here on June 28, 2020. It has been viewed more than 220 times.

The 30-second clip shows a man beating another man with a stick, while a third man looks on.

The post’s caption reads: “#CPEC :Chinese Engineer in Karachi caught on video beating #Pakistani driver for submitting fake petrol bill. Engineer from Power China Gansu Energy Company came to #Pakistan under CPEC.”

CPEC is an acronym for the China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a major energy and infrastructure investment project between the two countries.

A screenshot taken on July 16, 2020, of the misleading Facebook post

The video was also shared alongside a similar claim on Facebook here, here, here and here and on Twitter here and here.

The claim is false.

The same footage was published by The Star, a Malaysian newspaper, here on November 29, 2016. The report bears a Kuala Lumpur dateline and is headlined: “Police seek info on violent caning shown in viral video”.

A closer analysis of the video reveals the men are speaking Malay, the official language of Malaysia. One of the men is seen wearing a shirt that features the logo of Global Bersih 5, a campaign for fair elections that was organised in Malaysia in 2016.

The video also circulated in 2016 on Malaysian Facebook pages. The footage was published here in a post that has been viewed 490,000 times and shared 10,000 times.

The Malay-language post translates to English as: “Let’s viral make this case explode!!! Think the country is lawless, whipping people happily??? #PDRM.”

PDRM is an acronym for the Royal Malaysia Police.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading Facebook post (L) and the 2016 video (R):

A screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading Facebook post (L) and the 2016 video (R)

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