Clip of Man Stealing Electricity in Pak Shared With Communal Undertone in India

The video, which dates back to 2020, was from Karachi Pakistan, and not India as mentioned in the viral claim.

Fact-Check|A video of a Pakistani man threatening to kill a man if they disrupt his electricity connection is shared as that in India.

(Photo: The Quint)

A video showing a man boasting about stealing electricity and threatening to kill or get killed if his electricity connection was disrupted has gone viral with a claim that it was in India and the man belonged to a minority community.

However, we found that the video, which dates back to 2020, was from Pakistan. It was first shared by Pakistan-based ARY News channel on their official Facebook and Dailymotion pages.

CLAIM

The caption shared with the viral video said, "बिजली चोरी करूंगा! नहींं मानूंगा!! मरूंगा या मारूंगा। ये तालिबान तो देश के भीतर ही पैदा हो रहा है."

[Translation: I will steal electricity! I will not agree!! I will die or I will kill. This Taliban is being born within the country itself.]

In the video, the man can be heard saying the same thing. Sharing the post, Harinder S Sikka, author of Calling Sehamat – which inspired the 2008 film Raazi – wrote, 'There is a Taliban inside the country'. However, the author has now deleted the post.

An archived version of the tweet can be seen here.

(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

The same video was shared by several users on Facebook and Twitter, archives of which can be found here, here, here and here

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We extracted keyframes using the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension and conducted a reverse image search on some of them.

In the search results, we found a link to a tweet of a Pakistani social media handle called @siasatpk. The tweet was from 28 July 2020.

An archive of the post can be found here.

(Photo: Twitter/Screenshot)

The link lead us to a report published by Pakistan-based ARY news on their official Dailymotion channel.

In the news report, the anchor says that the incident ocurred in Karachi, Pakistan. She identifies the man in the video as Ataur Rehman and says that Rehman threatened the authorities from the electricity department when they tried to install an electric meter and prevent him from stealing electricity.

Taking cues for the videeo, we conducted a keyword search and found the same video on ARY News' official Facebook page, posted on 28 July 2020.

Evidently, a video from July 2020 from Pakistan was shared with a false claim that it showed an India Muslim man threating to kill a person for disrupting his electricty connection.

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