Fact Check: Are Muslims getting beaten up in detention centres in Assam?
By Satya Priya BN Published on 29 Dec 2019 7:20 AM GMT
Hyderabad: A video showing police mistreating inmates and brutally beating them is going viral on social media. The video is captioned, "Muslims are in Detention Camp in Assam. May Allah protect all of them — Ameen Ya Rab (sic)."
The video, which had gone viral on Facebook and WhatsApp, had also amassed viewers on YouTube.
Fact Check
On the top left, the video shows the date as November 22, 2018, and on the top right, a logo says "TruthLanka.com". Though we were not able to find the website TruthLanka.com, there is a Facebook page with the same logo. It states that TruthLanka.com is a Sri Lanka-based news and media website.
NewsMeter extracted a screenshot from the video and performed a reverse image search in Google. The results showed articles from January 15, 2019, many of them titled "Protesting Prisoners at Agunakolapelessa Prison Brutally Assaulted".
We found an article published by a website named Colombo Telegraph, carrying a screenshot from the video. The report consisted of five parts of the CCTV footage in the Agunakolapelessa prison, showing the inmates crawling, while the police beat them up with sticks. The article added that a three-member committee would probe into this merciless attack perpetrated by authorities on the inmates on November 22, 2018.
Almost 20 more visuals that are similar can be seen on Sudesh Nandimal's Facebook page.
The incident in the video is from a Sri Lankan prison, happened in November 2018 and NOT from an Assam Detention Center. Therefore, the claim that Muslims are being beaten up in an Assam Detention Center is FALSE.
