Not a teacher beating children in India – this video is from an orphanage in Egypt
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on August 5, 2019 at 12:00
- 2 min read
- By AFP India
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The three minute, 43 second long video was published here in a Facebook post on June 6, 2019.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:
A caption alongside the video says: “Viral video please share must” in English.
It continues in Hindi: “You must not leave any Facebook number or group, send this video to everyone. He is a teacher of a Rajbagh DPS school in Valsad. Share this widely so that the school is closed and the teacher goes behind bars. Action will be taken if the video goes viral. Those who don't feel pity can shut their mouths.”
Several other posts on Facebook contain an edited, 30 second long version of the video, for example here, here and here alongside the same claim.
All the posts say the incident took place at a school in Rajbagh, an area in the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The claim is false; this is an old video from Egypt that shows the manager of an orphanage in the capital, Cairo. The manager was reportedly sentenced to three years in prison in September 2014.
A Google search for freeze-frame images from the video obtained using video analysis tool InVid found several screenshots of the video in this report published on August 5, 2014, on the UK’s Daily Mail website.
Below is a screenshot of the report:
“A wife filmed secret footage of her orphanage manager husband beating children with a stick and kicking them until they burst into tears,” reads a caption below the first snapshot of the video.
“The video shows Osama Mohamed Othman hitting the children with a stick and kicking them as they ran away, screaming in pain,” says another caption below the last two snapshots the video.
A screenshot from the misleading Facebook post (L) and one of the photos in the Daily Mail article (R) are shown side-by-side for comparison.
Here is an AFP report published on August 4, 2014, about the arrest of the orphanage manager in Egypt and the video's online circulation.
Another report by the BBC published here on September 10, 2014, says the manager, Osama Mohamed Othman, was sentenced to three years in jail for “assaulting seven children in his care and endangering their lives”.
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