Fact Check: Video of man spitting on cops not related to COVID-19 pandemic
By Satya Priya BN Published on 6 April 2020 12:51 PM GMT
India has so far recorded more than 3,500 COVID-19 cases. Meanwhile, officials have been claiming that 35 per cent of the infected people are those who had attended the Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi. Emergency personnel, including doctors, police officers, and sanitation workers, have been working round-the-clock to control the spread of the virus. Amidst this, a video of a man, reportedly a Tablighi Jamaat attendee, spitting on police officers with the intention of spreading Corona virus has gone viral on WhatsApp and Facebook.
Fact Check:
This claim is MISLEADING.
NewsMeter extracted keyframes from the video and did a reverse image search on Google. We found a video on https://news.abplive.com titled "Truth behind viral video of jail inmate spitting at police officer" published on 3 April, 2020.
ABP News investigated the video that is being linked to Corona virus and found that the man, Mohammad Sohal Shaukat Ali, was an inmate of Thane jail. He attacked cops inside a police van in the Naupada area of Thane when he was being brought back to Thane Central Jail after his appearance in Dindoshi court.
When we did a search using the keywords "Thane police beat man for spitting on them", we found a news report published on 29 February, 2020 on www.ndtv.com, about an undertrial prisoner who attacked the police and spit on them after he was denied homemade food.
After attending a court hearing, Ali's relatives tried to give him some homemade food but the police prevented them. When they were returning to Thane jail, Ali started abusing the cops and argued with them. He spit on one policeman and manhandled another. A case was registered against him at Naupada police station under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code.
We also found a video on YouTube published on 29 February, 2020.
Also, the same video has been published by Mumbai Mirror on Facebook.
Therefore, the claim that a man who attended the Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi spit on cops intending to spread Corona virus is FALSE. The video is NOT related to COVID-19 and instead was of an incident that happened in February 2020 in Thane, Mumbai.
