“इस विडियो को गौर से देखें…क्या यह दंगा कराने के मकसद से नमाज नहीं पढ़ रहा (Watch this video carefully..Is he not offering namaz with an intent of inciting a riot -translated)”, tweeted a user named Pusphendra Kulshrestha, along with a video of a man offering a namaz in the middle of the road. At the time of writing this article, the tweet garnered more than 2,800 retweets and 4,400 likes.
इस विडियो को गौर से देखें…
क्या यह दंगा कराने के मकसद से नमाज नहीं पढ़ रहा😡 pic.twitter.com/3QYL0fpymh
— Pushpendra Kulshrestha (@Nationalist_Om) June 23, 2019
Many other individual users quote-tweeted the video believing it to be from India.
Video from Malaysia
Alt News discovered that the video is from Malaysia and not from India. The two billboards seen in the video have phone numbers, which we traced to a Malaysian business website, Emhub.com.
We found that the video has been circulating on the internet at least since December 2018. An individual Twitter user, who goes by the name Abdillah Toha, had posted the video on December 12, 2018. This was one of the earliest instances that Alt News could locate.
Contoh orang beragama yang kurang sehat akalnya karena overdosis. pic.twitter.com/D9IRkRUR1D
— Abdillah Toha (@AT_AbdillahToha) December 12, 2018
An article published in Malay, days after the video went viral on social media, claimed that the clip was shot on “Sprint Highway” located in Klang Valley, Malaysia. Moreover, a passerby in the video can be heard speaking in Malay. The passer-by can be heard saying, “Brother, what are you doing? why are you praying here? you might end up dying there. (translated)”.
Alt News looked up the street view from SCland Gallery (the business that was advertised in the billboard) to Sprint Highway on Google Maps.
On the way to Sprint Highway, we found the exact spot where the footage was shot.
In the images posted below, we have listed the structures visible in multiple frames of the video.
- A hut
- Two billboards placed behind each other
- Advertising boards diagonally placed on a divider of the road [Click on the images below to expand them]
The structures collated in one of the frames of the highway’s street view available on Google Maps. A screenshot of the single frame is posted below.
Thus, Alt News was able to independently establish that the video is from Klang Valley, Malaysia and not India.
An incident where a man was offering namaz on a Malaysian road was falsely shared as a Muslim in India putting the life of passers-by in jeopardy.
With contribution from Aqib Khan.
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