A photo of a woman sitting on the floor with police personnel standing behind her is being shared on social media with a claim that she is Vaishali Yadav, gram pradhan (village head) of Tera Pursoli village in Hardoi district of Uttar Pradesh, who has been arrested for making a 'fake' video asking the government to evacuate her from Ukraine.
As Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a "special military intervention" in Ukraine on 24 February. Yadav, an MBBS student studying in a medical college there, had made a video appealing to the Indian government to evacuate her from the war-torn country.
However, soon several Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders alleged she is in UP and has made the video from India, falsely claiming that she is stuck in Ukraine. We debunked this claim when the video went viral.
Further, The Quint's WebQoof team found that the woman seen in the photo is also not Yadav.
She is Kamala Chaudhary, who was arrested by Nagaur police in Rajasthan on 3 March after she posted pictures of her firing bullets on social media.
Uttar Pradesh police, too, tweeted stating that claims that say she is Yadav are wrong.
CLAIM
The photo is being shared along with the claim in Hindi that reads, "यूपी पुलिस सबसे तेज।यूपी पुलिस द्वारा यूक्रेन से रेस्क्यू की गयी ग्राम प्रधान की बेटी."
(Translation: UP Police is the fastest. The daughter of village head rescued from Ukraine by UP Police.)
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We conducted a Google reverse image on the photo and found a report on the website of news channel News18 Hindi published on Friday, 4 March.
According to the report, a woman named Kamala Chaudhary was arrested in Rajasthan after she had posted a video online stating that she takes drugs and challenged police to take action against her.
Taking a cue from here, we also looked for other news articles and one by news agency PTI read that the 27-year-old Chaudhary had posted the video on social media where she said that she had consumed the banned drug ecstasy and dared the police to take action against her.
In the video, she was seen opening fire with a weapon, following which a case under the Arms Act and Information Technology (IT) Act was registered at Kotwali police station against her.
We also found a video about the incident on the YouTube channel of Hindi media channel News24.
Further, we scanned the Twitter handle of Nagaur police and found a tweet posted on 3 March where we can see the photo, that is now being shared claiming to be of Yadav.
We also found a tweet by Uttar Pradesh police on 5 March, which read that the photo is from Nagaur and asked citizens to refrain from speading fake news.
Next, we made a side-by-side comparison and clearly Chaudhary is not Yadav's doppelganger either.
VAISHALI YADAV MADE FAKE VIDEO FROM UKRAINE?
The Quint's WebQoof team has earlier debunked the false claim that Yadav had made a fake video at the behest of her father, who is a member of the Samajwadi Party (SP), and that she had faked her location and made a video from Hardoi defaming the government's rescue operation named 'Operation Ganga' in Ukraine.
Although it is true that Yadav's father is a SP member and she is a gram pradhan, but she had not made a fake video.
She had shared with The Quint her live location, which showed her to be in Romania, bordering Ukraine. She reached Romania from Ukraine on 28 February, and reached home on 2 March, according to News18.
We had also spoken to Hardoi SP Rajesh Dwivedi on 2 March who had confirmed to The Quint that the claim of Vaishali's arrest is untrue and preparations are on to bring her back to India.
Clearly, an unrelated photo is being shared on social media with the false claim that it shows Yadav, who came back from Ukraine, following the Russian invasion.
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