This is not a video of the June 2019 funeral -- the footage has circulated online since 2018

This article is more than one year old.
Published on July 8, 2019 at 09:15
2 min read
By AFP India

A video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times in multiple Facebook posts which claim it shows the funeral of a Muslim man who died after allegedly being tortured by a mob in India in June 2019. The claim is false; the video has circulated online since at least 2018 in reports about a different man’s death.

The one-minute 10-second video was shared in this Facebook post on June 26, 2019, where it has been viewed more than 900,000 times and shared more than 26,000 times.

Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:

The footage shows a group of people wearing white skull caps and carrying a coffin.

The Hindi-language caption of the misleading post translates into English as: “Allah is the greatest, Allah is the greatest, the funeral of Tabrez Ansari, may Allah bestow him with a place in paradise.”

Police arrested 11 people on Tuesday, June 25, 2019, after a Muslim man, Tabrez Ansari, was attacked in Jharkhand state.

Ansari was allegedly beaten by a mob and forced to chant Hindu slogans. Here is an AFP report about the incident.

Ansari died on June 22, 2019 and Tabrez Ansari’s uncle Maqsood Alam told AFP by phone that the family held a funeral the same day.

“Tabrez died on June 22 and we received his body after the postmortem. He was buried on the same day, 22 June, 9 pm in the evening," Alam told AFP.

The same video was also shared on Facebook here and here with a similar claim.

It was also shared on YouTube here with a similar claim.

The video does not show Ansari's funeral on June 22, 2019 -- the footage has circulated online since at least 2018 in reports about a different man’s death.

A watermark can be seen on the video in the misleading posts which reads ‘EenaduIndia’.

Eenadu India is the former name of Indian TV news channel ETV Bharat.

A reverse image search on Google found the same video published here on YouTube on September 22, 2018, on a channel for ETV Bharat’s Bihar desk.

Below is a screenshot of the video in the misleading posts (L) and the video on ETV Bharat’s YouTube channel (R):

Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.

E-mail