Incident From Morocco Shared as Attack on Muslim Woman in India
It’s an old incident from Casablanca in Morocco where a girl was reportedly assaulted by a bunch of young men.
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(Editor's Note: This story was first published on 8 July 2019 and is being republished from The Quint's archives in light of an old video of a burqa-clad woman being reshared, to falsely link it to the Karnataka hijab row.)
CLAIM
A video, which shows a burqa-clad Muslim woman being attacked by men is being circulated online with the claim that the incident took place in India.
The caption which accompanies the video is in Hindi and roughly translates to, “What’s happening in this country? Is this how you will win the trust of people? Is this your ‘New India’?”
The user tagged Prime Minister Narendra Modi, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and Minister of Minority of Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi.
TRUE OR FALSE?
While the incident depicted did happen, it took place in Morocco, not in India. Further, it dates back to 2015, when it had caused widespread outrage in the country.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
On breaking down the video into key frames using the Google Chrome Invid extension, we found out that the video is from Morocco.
On using the key words ‘Morocco Muslim woman attacked eggs’, we came across an article published by Morocco World News which had reported the incident.
The report read that the assault took place in Casablanca during Ashura Day celebrations. As per the report, Moroccans celebrate Ashura, which is the tenth day of Muharram.
As can be seen in the video, the woman was attacked with eggs, flour and further harassed. The assault doesn’t stop until a passerby interferes to help the woman.
While looking into the incident, we came across another report by the news portal Observers.France24, which carried an article titled ‘Debunked: A supposed “Islamophobic” attack on a Moroccan girl’.
As per the story, the boys were not harassing the girl but were just having “fun”. The article also quotes the boys as saying that “the girl was like their sister”. The girl corroborated the boys version as well. However The Observers questioned if the girl was coerced into giving that statement.
The Quint has not been able to verify the boys’ version mentioned in The Observers’ story. However, the incident is certainly not from India as claimed in the post on Twitter.
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