Old, unrelated video viral as funeral of teenager who killed French teacher Samuel Paty

A video of an Islamic funeral procession is widespread on Facebook with a Tamil caption claiming that a massive funeral service was conducted for 18-year-old teenager Abdullakh Anzorov who was shot by the police for killing Samuel Paty in France. It says that his body was brought to Chechnya for last rites. Anzorov hailed from Russia’s Muslim majority region Chechnya. He had been living in France since 2008.

Several users have shared the clip on Facebook with the same caption.

Old, unrelated video

We performed a reverse image search of the video’s keyframes with the help of InVID and found a news report by Caucasian Knot published on August 6, 2018. According to the report, a funeral service was conducted for Yusup Temirkhanov on August 4, who was convicted for killing the serviceman Yuri Budanov. Thousands of people including the head of Chechnya attended Temirkhanov’s funeral.

We also found another video of the funeral procession posted on YouTube by Ruptly.

According to a Caucasian Knot, “Yusup Temirkhanov was buried in the cemetery of his clan village of Geldagan, one of his relatives has reported.” So we looked for Geldagan on Google Maps and were able to locate a mosque ‘Mechet’ Geldagan’ identical to the mosque in the viral video.

Furthermore, news reports about Samuel Paty’s killer Andullakh Anzorov’s funeral were not found. A video from August 2018, shot in Chechnya, is viral with the false claim that it shows Chechen Muslims performing Anzorov’s last rites. Earlier, an old video from Yemen was shared with the false claim that it shows Chechen Muslims protesting against France.