CLAIM
On 20 December, a cleric Asad Raza Hussaini was reportedly picked up by Muzaffarnagar police along with 40 students of his seminary following protests against the Citizenship law in the state.
According to news reports, Hussaini and his students were tortured in police custody. Now a video is going viral on social media which claims to show the police beating Hussaini.
The caption along with the video reads, “Maulana Syed Raza Hussaini..Age 82 years ..
Muzaffarnagar Resident .. (UP) UPDATE: The police dragged the children into a madrassa and brutally assaulted them, shouting, "You don't need citizenship!" #IndiaAgainstCAA_NRC (sic).”
The video has been shared by multiple users on Facebook.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The video is actually from November, 2019 and it shows a farmers’ protest in Unnao demanding compensation.
The Quint had reported on the incident which occurred on 17 November where farmers protested demanding higher compensation for the land acquired from them for a proposed township.
However, it must be noted that although the video is of a different incident, there have been multiple news reports which suggest police brutality on the UP cleric. According to an article in The Telegraph, the cleric was kept in a dark room for over 24 hours and beaten.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
On conducting a reverse image search on one of the key frames of the video we came across a video uploaded by a channel called ‘U News’ on 16 November 2019. As per the description of this video it was of a farmers’ protest.
Subsequently, we searched on YouTube with relevant keywords and came across another video uploaded by ‘NYOOOZ UP- Uttarakhand’ which stated that the video was from Unnao.
Another keyword search on YouTube led us to multiple news reports which had reported on the incident and we were able to match one frame of the viral with a frame in the video played by ‘UP Tak’, a subsidiary of Aaj Tak.
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