Zee Hindustan Shares Video From Pakistan With a False Communal Spin

With the help of a local journalist, we contacted the victim's nephew who denied that the matter was communal.

A video showing a woman being dragged and beaten up by several people is going viral on the internet with the claim that the victim was a Hindu woman, who was brutally attacked by Muslims in Pakistan.

Several social media users have shared this video and stated that the incident was a result of communal violence. Referring to the attack on minorities in Pakistan, users sharing the video have mentioned how Pakistan isn't safe for the Hindu minorities.

However, we found that this incident, which took place in January 2022, did not have a communal angle. The victim was a Muslim woman named Munawar Kanwal, who was tortured by people from her community due to a land dispute in Sialkot, Pakistan.

CLAIM

The claim suggests that the incident was a result of communal violence, where the victim was dragged and tortured by people from the Muslim community. The viral post was uploaded by Zee Hindustan, and the video has more than 355K views.

It was uploaded with a caption in Hindi, "पाकिस्तान में नहीं रुक रहा है हिन्दुओं पर जुल्म मामूली बात पर हिन्दू महिला को लाठी डंडों से पीटा गया. पीड़ित हिन्दुओं की कहीं नहीं हो रही है सुनवाई."

(Translation: The atrocities on Hindus are not stopping in Pakistan. A Hindu woman was beaten up with sticks on a minor issue. Victims are not being heard anywhere.)

(Note: We have refrained from including any links to the video due to the distressing nature of the visuals.)

Similar claims were made by several other users on Facebook and Twitter.

WHAT WE FOUND

We noticed all the tweets mentioned that the incident happened in Pakistan. So, taking this as a clue we searched for the same on the website of Dawn, a Pakistani newspaper.

This led us to a report which mentioned that the brutal attack happened in the Sialkot district, where an altercation resulted in the torture of the elderly woman.

It identified the victim as Munawar Kanwal. The report was published on 10 January 2022. The report didn't have any mention of religion of the victim nor did it say that the attack was because of the person's religion.

We found another report published on 9 January on Geo News, a Pakistani television channel, which mentioned that a case was registered against 15 people, of which nine were arrested. Speaking to the channel, the elderly woman said that the incident happened due to a long-standing land dispute.

The report also added that the Chief Minister of Pakistan's Punjab, Usman Buzdar, had ordered immediate action against the accused.

Sialkot Police had also posted about the incident on their Facebook page, which said that four more accused have been arrested after the elderly woman was brutally tortured. They further mentioned that strict action will be taken against these people and justice will be served to the victim.

We then reached out to a Pakistan-based journalist Naveed Akbar, who contacted the woman's nephew, Matrub Alam, who told us that she was a Muslim and there is no communal angle to the incident.

Evidently, a video of an incident from January 2022 is being given a false communal angle as both the accused and the victim belonged to the same religious community.

(With inputs from Abhilash Mallick and Naveed Akbar.)

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