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An archive can be seen here.
An archive can be seen here.
(Archives of similar claims can be seen here and here.)
What's the truth?: These visuals are old and unrelated to the recent protests that happened in France.
What protests?: France has been witnessing clashes between the public and the police after the death of Nahel, a 17-year-old teenager who was allegedly killed at the hands of the police for driving a car without a license.
The truth of the first video: We noticed 'Saint-Denis' written on top of the viral video, which is the capital city of a French Island called Réunion.
On performing a relevant keyword search, we came across an old YouTube video from 12 February 2020.
The video matched the viral video and was titled in French, "Lions roam in Saint-Denis at night without any surveillance".
We also came across a Twitter post and a Facebook post sharing the same video on 11 February 2020.
Both posts stated that this video is from Saint-Denis.
Second video is old as well: For this video, too, we performed a relevant keyword search and came across a report by NDTV shared on 14 April 2020.
The report also carried screenshots from the viral video and mentioned that these animals escaped from a circus.
Another report from Huffington Post from 11 April 2020 carried more such videos of the animals running around on the streets.
It stated animals from the Badin circus in Ormesson-sur-Marne escaped and headed to the streets of Champigny-sur-Marne, in Val-de-Marne.
A similar report also shared by a French news outlet, Le Parisien, carrying the same viral video.
Zoo's clarification on Twitter: The claims mentioned that these animals were 'released by protestors' from the Paris zoo.
Paris Zoological Park replied to one such claim on Twitter on 3 July.
They dismissed the claims and said all animals are safe in the zoo.
Conclusion: Although we could not independently verify the context of the videos, it is evident that these visuals are old and predate the France protests.
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