Video From 2019 Passed Off as ‘Wife of Dubai King’ at Vellore Golden Temple

The video is from 2019 when Princess Hend Al Qassimi visited the Sripuram temple in Vellore.

The woman seen in the picture is Princess Hend Al Qassimi, a member of the royal family from United Arab Emirates (UAE). 

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

A video is being shared on social media with a claim that 'the wife of the King of Dubai' was on a business trip to Chennai, and visited the Golden Temple in Sripuram in Tamil Nadu.

However, we found that the video is from 2019 when the Princess Hend Al Qassimi, a member of the royal family from United Arab Emirates (UAE), visited the Sri Lakshmi Narayani Golden Temple, also known as the Sripuram Golden Temple, in Tamil Nadu's Vellore.

CLAIM

The video is being shared along with the claim that reads, "She is the wife of the King of Dubai supposed to be the head of Islam, on a business trip to Chennai and she visited Golden Temple in Sripuram of Tamil Nadu. No burkha no abuse of Kaphirs. She wore tilak performed abhishekham to Goddess Lakshmi. Hear what she is saying about visiting temples. (sic)"

An archive of the tweet can be post here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

More archived links can be seen here, here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

We extracted several keyframes from the video with the help of InVid, a video verification tool, and conducted a reverse image search on some of them.

A Google reverse image search led us to a Facebook post (archive here) from 2020 by a user who said that it was UAE's Princess Hend Al Qassimi who performed pooja at a temple.

Next, taking this as cue, we conducted a keyword search on Google and came across a video on YouTube on a channel named 'Sripuram TV,' the official channel of the Vellore temple, published on 3 June 2019.

The title read, "Her Highness Sheikha Hend Faisal Al Qassemi Visited Sripuram, on 22-02-2019."

We then looked with keywords, and found news reports from 2020 on Navbharat Times, Punjab Kesari, and Amar Ujala, saying that when the princess posted an old video from her visit to the Tamil Nadu temple in a tweet, she was trolled on social media for it.

She captioned the video, "In India, I explored the mountains of Pondicherry where the sun kissed my cheeks as I walked the fields, bought sari fabrics and bindis as I ate the naan bread with my chai. I paid a visit to the Golden Temple Vellore and broke bread with HH Sri Sakthi Amma and ate off banana leaves. (sic)"

The video was posted in 2020. 

(Source: Wayback Machine/Altered by The Quint)

Clearly, an old video is being shared now on social media with the false claim that Sheikha Hend Al Qassimi recently visited the Vellore Golden temple, and that she is the "wife of King of Dubai".

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