Various videos of CCTV footage of the Jamia violence on 15 December 2019, released one after the other, have unleashed a plethora of fake claims on social media. The latest has involved misidentifying a student. It has been claimed that the same student who was involved in arson at the university was also shot at outside the university area.
CLAIM
A photo collage of two different students is being circulated online to claim that the student who was shot at outside Jamia Milia Islamia University on 30 January was the same student who was allegedly seen carrying a stone – a claim which has now been debunked by fact-checking website AltNews.
The video was aired by News18 Hindi, in which the channel attributed the information to Delhi police and said that the cops have claimed that the two individuals seen in the photographs are the same.
An archived version of the post can be seen here. This video had been viewed over 38,000 times at the time of this story.
The channel has now issued an apology for broadcasting the wrong information.
https://twitter.com/ashu_najar/status/1230916084254961676It was also shared by multiple users on Facebook.
TRUE OR FALSE
The individuals in the two photographs are not the same.
The one in the college footage from 15 December has been identified as Mohammad Ashraf Bhatt. The Quint spoke to multiple students at the university who corroborated this information to us. We were not able to trace Bhatt to get a comment from him, but he could be seen in the footage which was released by the police earlier this week at around 18:05.
The second student who was shot outside the university was identified as Shadab Farooq. We got in touch with Farooq to know about his whereabouts on 15 December and he told us that he was attending the Jashn-e-Rekhta event which was held at Major Dhyanchand Stadium in Delhi between 13 and 15 December.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
Farooq shared photographs of the event with us to show that he was attending the event.
AltNews also got in touch with another student, Nawa Fatima, who was with Farooq at the time and she told the website that approximately ten of them went for the event on 15 December and they left the stadium at around 6:30 pm.
According to Fatima, the students were told not to go to the college because of the violence and they were together till around 7:30 pm.
Shadab has also demanded an apology letter from News18 for defaming him in the video.
(Editor's Note: The story has been updated to incorporate an apology issued by the channel.)
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