A video of blindfolded men, who are flogged by a group of army personnel, is circulating on social media. The caption attested with the video reads, “Sri Lankan Police caught Terrorist supporters & watch treatment they gave to daily but no court / no Biryani but daily this hard beating. Watch.👇🏼 MUST SEE IMMEDIATELY”. It is being claimed that the Sri Lankan police personnel are thrashing terrorist supporters.
Sri Lankan Police caught Terrorist supporters & watch treatment they gave to daily but no court / no Biryani but daily this hard beating. Watch.
Posted by Prem kumar rao on Friday, 3 May 2019
The message also attempts, to take a jibe at the erstwhile UPA regime, by stating that the Sri Lankan police is not serving them “Briyani”. It may be noted that this jibe, reiterated by the members of the Bharatiya Janata Party time and again in the past, is also based on misinformation.
Few more individuals on Facebook have shared the video with the identical narrative.
Fact-check
Alt News had earlier debunked the same video when it went viral on social media with a false claim that it depicted the Pakistani army personnel thrashing their own soldiers as a punishment for deserting the army earlier this March. This video has been available on YouTube as early as February 2019, a good two months before the Sri Lanka bomb attacks. Thus, a video available on the internet since February 5, 2019, cannot be representative of an event, which happened in April 2019.
According to the caption, the video depicts the Pakistani army’s Special Service Group commando training. Moreover, a relevant keyword search on YouTube throws up many other similar videos, where soldiers are seen blindfolded with their hands tied behind the back and are tortured in a similar fashion.
The attire worn by the soldiers is also a give away that these are NOT Sri Lankan police personnel, but Pakistani army soldiers.
A reportage of Express News, an Urdu News channel also explains about the torture resistance training given to the Pakistani army soldiers. You can read our detailed fact-check here.
In conclusion, an old video, which existed on YouTube two months before the attack, is being shared as Sri Lankan police torturing supporters of terrorists.
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