Old Video Being Circulated as ‘Soldier Beaten to Death in Kashmir’

Visuals from the video where the soldier is being beaten up by the mob.

(Photo Courtesy: Video Screengrab)

कश्मीर में आज फिर एक सैनिक को पिट पिट कर हत्या कर दी गई दोस्तों इंसानियत के नाते आपसे हाथ जोड़कर विनती है की यह विड़ीयो ज्यादा से ज्यादा ग्रुप में भेजना है कल शाम तक हरेक न्यूज़ चैनल में आना चाहिए कोई माई का लाल हीं इसे शेयर करेगा (Today, a soldier was again mercilessly beaten to death in Kashmir. Friends, its a humble request to you, please share this video in maximum groups. By tomorrow evening it should come in every news channel).

A video has been circulating on social media for the last few months, in which a mob is seen assaulting a person. It is claimed that this person is an Indian army soldier and that he has been brutally beaten to death by locals.

This video is being shared on Facebook, as well as on Twitter. A page named Modi’fied 2019 also shared this video with the same claim and its got more than 8,000 shares and 91,000 views. Most of the posts are by individual users with identical/similar text, which again indicates that this video with the aforementioned claim is being shared on WhatsApp.

(Photo: Alt News)

Where is this video from? Is it true that this is an Indian army soldier who was beaten to death by Kashmiris? Alt News fact checked the claim and found:

1. The video is of October 2017
2. The person in the video being assaulted is an Indian Territorial Army officer
3. He was assaulted by locals in Kupwara district of Kashmir on suspicion of being a braid chopper
4. He was not beaten to death but was injured

Mysterious incidents of braid chopping in the Kashmir valley in 2017 had led to anger and unrest among the people which manifested itself in this brutal incident wherein a soldier was assaulted. The incident had been reported by Scroll, Greater Kashmir and The Kashmir Monitor. Times Now and India today had also reported this incident that took place in October 2017. A video of the incident was also published by Greater Kashmir, a Kashmir based news organisation and can be seen below.

The video posted above is not the exact video which is being circulated with the false claim. In order to conclusively establish that the two videos are of the same incident, Alt News did a frame-by-frame analysis of the two videos and a side-by-side comparison of the same can be seen below. In the image below, the screenshots on the left are from the viral video, while the screenshots on the right are from Greater kashmir’s video which had been published on 17th Oct, 2017. We have highlighted individuals who can be seen in both the videos thus confirming that the two videos are indeed of the same event.

This is not the first time that this particular video has been shared as a recent incident. Two months back, this video was circulating on social media with the same claim and was shared almost 5,000 times from one post alone. Earlier, Alt News had reported how a photograph of an assault on a J&K policeman that was clicked in 2010 was being circulated as a recent event. Posts like these only serve to exacerbate the tension and mistrust that prevails between Kashmir and Kashmiris, and the rest of India.

(This article was originally published on AltNews.)

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