CLAIM
The video was shared with by a user with the caption, “Macron continues to close more than 100 mosques across France,” amassing over 48,700 views and 1,100 likes at the time of writing this article.
A user also shared the video with an Arabic caption stating that France had a declared a “war against Muslims” and the “Clichy Grand Mosque in Paris and Anhalua was stormed.” The video had over 20,000 shares at the time of writing this article.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
Taking a cue from the claims that a mosque in Paris’ suburb Clichy was ‘attacked,’ we performed a keyword search in French.
We found several YouTube videos uploaded in March 2017, describing it as an “evacuation of the mosque in downtown Clichy-la-Garenne” and “Clichy mosque closed by CRS..paris.”
The videos showed similar visuals of an individual dressed in red struggling with the police officers.
Further, we also found a news report by French daily 20 Minutes, carrying the same visuals.
The report stated that Compagnies républicaines de sécurité (CRS), the general reserve of the French National Police, evacuated the Muslims from a ‘prayer room’ in the town hall in Clichy. The town hall intended to install a media library instead, in the room occupied by the Muslim community for their prayers.
Hence, according to reports the police had evacuated the ‘prayer room,’ and the old video from 2017 has been falsely shared as a recent attack on Muslims amid the social media outrage.
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