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Fact-Check: This Is Not Julio Ribeiro Talking About Police & Violence in Manipur

The person in the video is senior advocate of the Supreme Court Colin Gonsalves, not Julio Ribeiro.

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A video of an interview, where one of the people is heard talking about the state's complicity in communal violence, while referring to the 2002 riots in Gujarat and the ethnic violence in Manipur is going viral on social media.

What is the claim?: Those sharing the video have identified the man as "Julius Rebiero ...Retd. Commissioner of Police Mumbai and Ex- DGP of Maharashtra (sic)".

  • In the video, the man says that "no communal attack can take place in this country without the head of that area, that state giving the orders to attack."

  • He continues by saying that if a chief minister of a prime minister tell the police to stop violence, "our police force can stop that violence in 24 hours."

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  • "If it doesn't stop, it means the order to continue comes right from the top. Gujarat was that. Manipur is that. So what do you do when the heads of your government is giving orders to kill?" he asks.

The Quint received a query for the verification of this claim on our WhatsApp tipline.

(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here, here and here.)

Is it true?: No, the man in the video is Supreme Court Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves.

  • The video is taken from an interview by NewsClick, where Gonsalves spoke at length about who is responsible for the orchestration of the widespread ethnic violence in Manipur.

How did we find out?: In the video, the man can be heard referring to himself as Colin when he says, "And I have had senior police officers tell us, Colin, if we had a free hand any police force in any state will stop the violence in 24 hours."

  • Using Colin as one of the keywords, we looked for more information about the video.

  • This search led us to an interview by journalist Siddhanth Aney, uploaded on NewsClick's verified YouTube channel, whose title identified the man as Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court Colin Gonsalves, who is also the founder of the Human Rights Law Network.

In this interview from 25 June, Aney and Gonsalves discuss the violence in Manipur, its start and who is to be held responsible for the scale of the violence in the state.

  • Gonsalves is representing the Kuki community in legal matters related to the ethnic violence in the state and had sought the Supreme Court's intervention to address the situation.

  • In the part of the video that has gone viral, Aney asks Gonsalves if he had "ever seen anything like this before" during his time at the Human Rights Law Network, where a chief minister was "unwilling or unable to have a conversation with the other side," after 50 days of violence.

  • The section of the interview where viral video is from starts at around the 26-minute mark.

Conclusion: The person speaking in the viral video is Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court Colin Gonsalves, who has been misidentified as former Maharashtra DGP Julio Ribeiro.

(Not convinced of a post or information you came across online and want it verified? Send us the details on WhatsApp at 9643651818, or e-mail it to us at webqoof@thequint.com and we'll fact-check it for you. You can also read all our fact-checked stories here.)

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