Man seen removing drain cover in viral CCTV footage from Mumbai is not a Muslim

A 36-second video, which appears to be CCTV footage, is going viral, which shows a man stepping out of an auto-rickshaw and forcefully wrenching open an iron grating or a manhole cover from the roadside. It is claimed that the man destroying public infrastructure is an illegal Bangladeshi named Sheik Nazarul.

X user Baba Banaras (@RealBababanaras) shared the video claiming that Sheik Nazarul had been arrested. (Archive)

Thanks to CCTV, this illegal Bangladeshi Sheik Nazarul was caught and arrested. They are digging the infrastructure of our country. They are eating our economy. They should be thrown out of our country. pic.twitter.com/96yU2Wmfi3

— Baba Banaras™ (@RealBababanaras) September 23, 2025

The post has garnered over 60,000 views.

Another X account, The Frontal Force (@FrontalForce), shared the video with similar claims on September 23, 2025. (Archive)

Thanks to CCTV, this illegal Bangladeshi Sheik Nazarul was caught and arrested. They are digging the infrastructure of our country. They are eating our economy & should be thrown out of our country. 😡 pic.twitter.com/E4BPBYXNw6

— Frontalforce 🇮🇳 (@FrontalForce) September 23, 2025

The post has accumulated over 4,00,000 views.

Another account named Eminent Intellectual (@totalwoke2) shared the video with the caption: “The 0.5 front”. ‘0.5 Front’ is a cryptic reference to former Army chief General Bipin Rawat’s 2017 remark that the Indian Army was prepared for two and a half-front war. By 2.5 front, he meant wars with Pakistan and China and internal security threats. The Right Wing often uses this ‘0.5 front’ terminology to refer to Muslims.    
The post has received approximately 1 million views.

Several other social media users have also shared the footage with similar claims.

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It is important to note that both Baba Banaras and The Frontal Force have been found by Alt News disseminating misinformation and communal propaganda several times in the past. 

Fact Check

To verify the authenticity of the claim, we first tried to locate the place of occurrence. A keyword search led us to an X post made by media outlet Local Tak on August 29, 2025, which had the same video. And in the caption, the location was mentioned as Aaram Nagar in Andheri West, Mumbai. 

🚨 Man Caught Breaking Drain Cover in Andheri West, Public at Risk 😡

Shocking visuals from Andheri West’s Aaram Nagar show a man arriving in an auto, breaking a metal drain cover and leaving it wide open within minutes. 😠 Residents say such reckless acts endanger lives and… pic.twitter.com/JYQNiqYhXn

— LocalTak™ (@localtak) August 29, 2025

Taking a cue from this, we looked for the FIR copy and found that a complaint in this regard had been registered at Versova police station, which had jurisdiction over the Aram Nagar area. The complaint was filed on August 28, 2025, by Vicky Shyamlal Sharma, a junior engineer with the roads department of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

According to the FIR, on August 28, Sharma reported to work at 10:30 am, and around 12:30 pm, while inspecting the area near a hotel on J P Road, Andheri West, Mumbai, he and his colleagues noticed that five iron gratings of 2ft x 1.5ft dimension belonging to municipal corporation were missing from the roadside drains. They searched the area, which yielded nothing, confirming that the iron gratings had been stolen. Sharma mentioned that the total cost of the five iron gratings was approximately Rs 65,000. 

Following this, we contacted Versova Police. Inspector Deepshikha Vare confirmed to Alt News that the man seen in the CCTV footage had been arrested on August 29, 2025, and was in judicial custody. His name was Amarjit Bikhari Kamati.

The officer shared further details of the case with us. The accused, Kamati, 30, was a resident of Goregaon West, Mumbai. He was booked under BNS 303 (2) (theft). Police had recovered all the five iron gratings from him. Remand papers shared by Versova Police with Alt News confirm that neither is the accused’s name Sheik Nazarul, nor is he a Bangladeshi.   

To sum up, the man seen in the video removing a drain cover from the roadside was falsely identified as Sheik Nazarul. In the incident reported from Aram Nagar in Mumbai’s Versova police station area, the accused has been identified as Amarjit Bikhari Kamati, a resident of Goregaon West, Mumbai. He has been arrested. The claims made by the social media account are false.