Video Showing Burqa-Clad Woman Kidnapping Child Is Staged and From Egypt

The scripted video was shot in Egypt by some people to garner views on social media.

Fact-Check: A staged video shot in Egypt showing a child's kidnapping has gone viral in India.

(Photo: The Quint)

A video showing a burqa-clad woman drugging and kidnapping a child with the help of a rickshaw driver has gone viral with many people claiming it to be real. Several people have also shared the video targeting the Muslim community.

However, we found that the video was a staged one and was shot in Egypt.

We found news reports from Egypt-based news organisations that reported on the incident and stated that Egypt’s Ministry of Interior also debunked the video last month when it went viral in Egypt. Reports also added that the people involved in making the video were arrested.

CLAIM

A reporter with Sudarshan News Santosh Chauhan posted the video with a caption that read, "अपने बच्चों को ऐसे लोगों से सावधान रखिए।".

[Translation: Take care of your children from such people.]

The video was viewed over 3,60,000 times by the time this story was being written.

Another Twitter profile called 'Hindu Mahasabha' shared the video and said, "Hindus, beware of these. They slit throat and kidnap with #Burqa."

A link to the archive can be found here. 

(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

The video was shared by several other people on Facebook and Twitter, archives of which can be found here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

Using the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension, we extracted keyframes from the viral video and conducted a reverse image search on some of them. While going through the search results, we came across an article on Masrawy, an Egypt-based Arabic news web portal.

The report said that the incident took place in Sohag, Egypt and added that the video was "fake." It further stated that the authorities had decided to take action against the people who shot the video and had arrested them.

A link to the story can be found here.

(Source: Masrawy/Screenshot)

Taking cues from the new article, we conducted a keyword search in Arabic and found similar reports published in other Arabic news portals (here and here).

The articles mentioned that the video went viral online in Egypt and the Ministry of Interior took note of the same. We then found the official social media handles of the Ministry of Interior and found a Facebook post published on 29 June.

The Facebook post stated that the ministry found the video to be 'fabricated.' It further stated that authorities looked for people who made the video and found that four people from Sohag were involved in making the video, adding that the person wearing the burqa was in fact a man.

The post further added that the aim of creating the staged video was to get financial gains by gaining more viewers.

Evidently, a staged video showing a child being kidnapped, shot by people in Egypt, has gone viral in India as a real one, with people targeting the Muslim community.

Similar staged/scripted videos have gone viral in India recently and many of them were used to make false claims about people from the Muslim community. The Quint's WebQoof team has fact-checked several of such stories that you can read here.

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