Fact Check: Video of brutal assault on a woman is from Myanmar, not Manipur

Hyderabad: Several social media users have shared a heart-wrenching video (trigger warning: viewer discretion advised) of a group of militants assaulting a young woman, linking it with the ongoing political and social unrest in Manipur.

In the viral video, you can spot a group of men apparently wearing similar uniforms brutally thrashing a young woman by mercilessly kicking and punching her face. At the end of the video, they shoot her dead.

According to the BBC, Manipur unrest ignited when ethnic violence plunged the state into what many have dubbed as a civil war as the state’s two largest groups, the majority Meitei and minority Kuki, battle over land and influence.

Many such viral videos have come into circulation after a video came out in May of two Kuki women being sexually assaulted in public by Meitei men, shortly after their village was razed, one of the many examples of the latest use of terror against women in the region.

NewsMeter received the viral video along with the caption on our WhatsApp as well.

Fact Check

NewMeter found that the claim is false as the video hails from Tamu, Myanmar.

On performing a reverse image search, we found the video on Yandex (a search engine). A report on the incident was published on December 6, 2022, on Click for PDF, which said that the video is about a woman who was brutally assaulted and killed by the People’s Defence Force (PDF) in Tamu.

The report said, “NUG stated that the incident of a lady being shot and murdered in Tamu is in contravention of the Military Code of Conduct and will take the action seriously.”

In the same reverse image search, we also found the same clip uploaded on a website called Rec Livegore (trigger warning: viewer discretion advised) with the title ‘Warning- Cruel Punishment In Myanmar.’

Taking a cue from this, we performed a keyword search and found the same report on a credible media website, Myanmar Now, published on December 6, 2022.

Hence, it is evident that a year-old video from Tamu, Myanmar is being passed off as unrest in Manipur.