The man being interviewed is not Sudan’s health chief but a journalist

This article is more than one year old.
Published on May 7, 2020 at 14:25
2 min read
By Adeng MAYIK, Mary KULUNDU, AFP Kenya

A video purporting to show Sudan’s health minister falling asleep while being interviewed live on TV has been viewed thousands of times on Facebook. But the claim is false; the person in the video is a Sudanese journalist who denied dozing off in front of the cameras.

The Facebook post from April 6, 2020, is archived here and shows a clip of a man being interviewed live on air by a network anchor.

The caption reads: “So the Minister of Health in Sudan was being interviewed... He dozed off and started snoring on live TV”.

Screenshot of the misleading Facebook post, taken on May 03, 2020

The post has been viewed more than 5,200 times and shared hundreds of times.

The same post with similar claims was also shared on Facebook here and here, and posted on Instagram here.

The video featured in these posts includes a loud snoring sound. But in an earlier version of the footage posted on YouTube on March 7 (with a similar claim), the snoring is missing. This indicates that the snoring sound was added to the later version.

In the interview, which has been translated by AFP into English from Arabic, the newscaster says: “Joining us now from Khartoum … Malik Taha, Editor-in-Chief of Al Ray Al Aam newspaper, welcome to Al Hadath TV. Mr. Malik, today President Al Bashir is leading the national dialogue committee since the announcement of a state of emergency, what is expected from this meeting?”

A pause follows before the anchorwoman realizes there is an issue. (In the earlier version of the footage, there is silence; in the later version, a snoring sound has been added here.)

“ ...Mr. Malik, can you hear me, Mr. Malik? It looks like the voice is not clear, we will return back to our guest when the voice is set up.”

Claims that the footage depicts Sudan’s health minister, who is Dr. Akram Ali Eltom (pictured below), are false.

A photo of Sudanese Health Minister from Sky News Arabia website.

The video, in fact, shows Malik Taha, the editor-in-chief of Sudan’s Al Ray Al Aam newspaper. He was being interviewed on Al Hadath TV during the Sudanese uprising in March 2019.

Taha has denied falling asleep during the interview. "I was only listening and I did not look at the camera," he told Al Arab news website, explaining that he could not hear any sound coming from his interviewer.

"After a few minutes, I was speaking to the host of the program after the sound reached me, but some took the opportunity and took the first part of the video to give people the impression that I was sleeping."

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