A graphic video showing a group of men brutally thrashing and killing a man on a road at night is being widely shared across social media platforms to claim that Muslim youth surrounded and thrashed Hindus returning after celebrating Holi in Uttar Pradesh's Bareilly.
However, we found that the incident was not from Uttar Pradesh. The video shows a dispute between hotel owners and a guest in Jaipur, Rajasthan, where the two groups quarrelled after consuming alcohol in Vaishali Nagar.
Inspector Heeralal Saini of Vaishali Nagar confirmed to The Quint that all parties involved were from the Hindu community and that there was no communal angle to the incident.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
Using InVID, a video verification tool, we divided the video into multiple keyframes and conducted a reverse image search on them.
This led us to a tweet by one Himanshu Mishra, who mentioned that the video was from Jaipur, Rajasthan and identified the victim as 22-year-old Vishal Yadav. The tweet was from 16 March.
Taking a cue from this, we looked for news reports on the incident and came across one by Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar which also stated that the incident happened in Rajasthan's Jaipur.
According to the report, the incident occurred in the early hours on Monday, 14 March in Jaipur's Vaishali Nagar, outside a hotel.
It mentioned that two groups of people got into an altercation outside the hotel along a bypass road in Vaishali Nagar and the matter escalated after a heated exchange.
Another report on the incident by The Times of India mentioned that 22-year-old Vishal Yadav was partying at a hotel with six friends, when they got into a verbal spat with the hotel staff.
It added that when the argument heated up, hotel staff thrashed Yadav and his friend with rods and frying pans, killing Yadav.
The Quint reached out to Vaishali Nagar Station House Officer (SHO) Heeralal Saini, who confirmed to us that the incident had happened there and that there was no communal motive behind it.
"There is no communal angle. They are all from the same, Hindu community. They got into a sudden fight after consuming alcohol and there was no old enemity between them," Saini said.
We also accessed a press note issued by the Rajasthan police on the matter which identified the nine accused as – Suresh (29), Prahlad Kumar (25), Lakhan (22), Mukesh (32), Lalchand (24), Mahendra (26), Anil (19), Aman (22) and Ashok (26)."
The press note provided details of a special team being constituted for the crime, noting that all nine accused in connection to the murder had been arrested within 12 hours.
Clearly, a graphic video of violence between two groups in Jaipur, Rajasthan was shared as one from Uttar Pradesh's Bareilly with a false communal spin.
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