New Delhi: Amid incidents of power theft, a video showing a man threatening officials after being caught stealing electricity has gone viral on social media. The PTI Fact Check Desk has found that the video was not from India but about an incident that took place in Pakistan four years ago.
A user on social media platform 'X' shared it stating: "I will commit electricity theft! I won't let you install the metre... I won't let you check the junction box; I won't comply!! I will either die or kill. This Taliban is growing within the country..., whether it's the police of India or any other government department, they become meek in front of them.
"Look how respectfully they are talking, but if a Hindu says the same thing, these government employees suddenly become Superman and beat the Hindu to a pulp," the user said on the post that has been viewed over 48,000 times and retweeted approximately 972 times.
The PTI Fact Check team extracted key frames from the video using the InVID tool to verify the claim's authenticity and then performed a reverse image search. This led them to a Facebook page named 360digitaltv, where the video was uploaded on August 6, 2020. When the Urdu caption of the video was translated into Hindi, we found that it stated that the incident took place in Karachi, Pakistan.
Based on this information, further searches were conducted on Google using other keywords, which led to a related report on the Pakistani news website Siasat.pk, published on July 28, 2020.
According to the report on the Pakistani news website, the viral video is of an incident that occurred in Karachi, Pakistan. The person seen shouting in the video was caught committing electricity theft, but instead of admitting his wrongdoing, he started threatening the government employees who had come for questioning.
Published 04 September 2024, 10:40 IST