Fact check: Image of sea of Delhi citizens marching for Arvind Kejriwal is misleading; crowd is from the Great Ethiopian Run

Hyderabad: AAP chief and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was recently arrested in the Delhi Excise Policy case. The Delhi court on March 28 extended the Enforcement Directorate’s custody of Kejriwal till April 1.

Against this backdrop, an image of a massive gathering of people in yellow-coloured outfits is being widely shared on social media with the claim that it shows Delhi citizens taking to the streets in solidarity with CM Kejriwal. The image is being shared with the caption, “All roads of Delhi are filled Kejriwals. (translated from Hindi)” (Archive link)

The image was also shared by some AAP leaders on their X handles. This includes Ravinder Balyan, state president of OBC Morcha, AAP Delhi, and Ravinder Dabas, an AAP youth leader.

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Fact Check

NewsMeter found that the claim is false as the viral image is from the Great Ethiopian Run, organized annually in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

We started our investigation by performing a reverse image search of the viral image. The search led us to the image on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund captioned ‘Haile Gebreselassie kicks off the Great Ethiopian Run under the slogan “We Can End Poverty by 2015”’.

A report on the site elaborated on the event: “Thirty-five thousand people took to the streets in Addis Ababa on 21 November to participate in the biggest road race on the African continent, the Great Ethiopian Run. Celebrating its 10th anniversary the race mobilised its largest numbers ever bringing together athletes, youth, children, women and men from Ethiopia and abroad under the slogan ‘We Can End Poverty 2015’. Held only months after the MDG Review Summit in New York, this massive mobilization puts the goals at centre stage reinforcing the need to accelerate progress towards their achievement.”

The news outlet The Reporter also gave details about the Great Ethiopian Run organised in November 2017.

Moving forward, we found an article on The Mossy Foot, dated November 15, 2015, titled ‘Team Mossy Foot in the Great Ethiopian Run’ carrying the same image, with not just yellow jersey participants but green and red jerseys as well.

The same image was tweeted by an X user with the caption, “The Great Ethiopian Run - 2017 – Addis Ababa, #Ethiopia! Beautiful Scenes! (sic)”(Archive)

Moreover, the viral image was also uploaded in an article on CNN on August 4, 2017. The image caption reads, “The annual Great Ethiopian Run in Addis Ababa is popular among tourists.”

Although we could not independently verify the date of the publication of the viral image we can conclude that it is old and unrelated to Delhi CM’s arrest.