Clip of Burqa-Clad Women Fighting in Saudi Arabia Shared as That From Bengaluru

This video dates back to 2018 and is Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Fact-check: This clip is old and not from Karnataka.

(Photo: The Quint)

A video showing five burqa-clad women fighting with each other in the middle of a road, all while putting a toddler in danger, is going viral on social media with a claim that this incident took place in Bengaluru, Karnataka.

It was also shared with hashtags around the 2023 Karnataka Assembly Elections that took place earlier on Wednesday and saw some violence near polling stations.

An archive can be seen here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

(Archives of similar claims can be seen here and here.)

Where is the video actually from?: The video dates back to 2018 and is from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

How did we find out the truth?: We divided the keyframes of the viral video and performed a reverse image search on some of them.

• This led us to several reports from 2018 which carried this same video or screengrabs of the video.

• A report by Indiatimes shared on 13 September 2018 stated that this video is from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and shows five women engaged in a brawl.

• It also adds that one of the women was holding a child and dropped him while fighting with others.

This story was published in 2018. 

(Source: IndiaTimes/ Screenshot)

• Several other news outlets including Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik and an English-language newspaper from United Arab Emirates, The Khaleej Times, also published reports about the incident in 2018.

• However, no report mentioned the reason behind this clash.

• We found a longer version of the video on YouTube and we noticed that the number plate had text numbers written in Urdu or Arabic. We then checked the number plate system in Saudi Arabia and it matched the one seen in the video.

Comparison of a number plate in viral video t o one from Saudi.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

Conclusion: Although we haven't verified the exact location of the video independently, it is evident that the clip is an old one from Saudi Arabia and unrelated to the ongoing Karnataka elections.

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