CLAIM
A viral video claims that the Sri Lankan Police caught terrorist supporters and thrashed them by blindfolding them. The video is being shared with the caption, “Sri Lankan Police caught Terrorist supporters & watch treatment they gave to daily but no court / no Biryani but daily this hard beating. Watch.”
The video has been shared by several users on Facebook.
The Quint also received a query about the origins of the same video via WhatsApp from a reader Radhika Das.
All these videos had similar claims which stated that the video showed “Sri Lankan Police thrashing terrorist supporters.”
TRUE OR FALSE?
The claims made in the video are false. The video is not of Sri Lankan Police torturing terrorist supporters, but of a training process being carried out by the Special Service Group (SSG) of Pakistani Army.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT?
A frame-by-frame breakdown analysis led us to an old YouTube video that was shared on 5 February. At 1:35, it can been seen that the T-shirt of one of the personnel mentions the word ‘Instructor,’ which suggests that a training process is going on in the video.
Further, the logo on the uniform of one of the personnel does not match with Sri Lankan Police’s logo. Rather, the logo seen in the video is of the Pakistani army.
DIFFERENT CLAIMS IN THE PAST
The same video had earlier been doing the rounds with the claim that the Pakistan Army SSG tortured soldiers of Pakistan Frontier Corps who abandoned their posts and escaped after the soldiers of Baloch Republic Army (BRA) attacked them. The same narrative was also reported on MyNation, who headlined their article as, “‘Peace loving’ Pakistan assaults its own security force."
Major Gaurav Arya had earlier shared the same video on Twitter that showed a Pakistan Army SSG commando flogging a group of blindfolded shirtless men dressed in army uniforms.
AltNews had earlier debunked the claim and found out that this particular training module is called ‘Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape’, which has been spoken about and recorded by Pakistani news channels in the past.
The fact-checking website quotes an Urdu news channel Express News’ reportage of the training, where an army officer elaborates on how torture resistance training is imparted to the soldiers.
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