A video has been viewed thousands of times in multiple posts on Facebook in April 2020 alongside a claim it shows police in India detaining people in a van carrying a COVID-19 patient after they failed to wear face masks outside.
The two-minute 18-second video shows police forcefully detaining people before putting them\xa0into a vehicle which is carrying a person on\xa0a stretcher., Below is a screenshot of the misleading post:, The post’s Thai caption translates to English as: “In India, people who don’t wear masks are put into a van that has COVID-19 patient (Police were pretended to be a patient).”, As of May 5, 2020, India\xa0reported more than 1,500 deaths and almost 33,000 cases of COVID-19, according to Indian Ministry of Health figures. In an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, the country has also been in a state of nationwide lockdown since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement on March 25, 2020., Comments from some Facebook users on the misleading post indicated they believed the video shows a real police incident., One person wrote: "This is good, they deserved it"., Another said: "I want Thailand to do something similar to this It\s so satisfying!!! LOL.", And one Facebook user wrote: "They knew it was dangerous but they didn\t realise. There are people like this everywhere in the world.", Below is a screenshot of the some of the comments with names redacted by AFP:, The video was also shared here, here, here and here on Facebook, alongside a similar claim., The video, however,\xa0has been shared in a misleading context., A reverse image search on Google followed by a\xa0keyword search found an identical video published here\xa0on the YouTube channel for\xa0Indian newspaper\xa0Hindustan Times on April 24, 2020., The video’s title reads: “Fake Covid patient’: TN Police releases awareness video for lockdown violators”, , The video caption states: “Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur police department releases awareness video for lockdown violators. In the promotional video, police can be seen putting lockdown violators with fake Covid-19 patients. This was an enactment video where even the violators were performers. People have been violating lockdown norms amid the coronavirus threat. India is under a nationwide lockdown till May 3 in view of Covid-19.”, Tiruppur\xa0is a district in southern India’s Tamil Nadu state., Below is a screenshot comparison of keyframes in the video in the misleading post (L) and the Hindustan Times video (R):, Tiruppur Police told AFP the video was\xa0“staged”., During a phone conversation on April 27, 2020, Tiruppur Police’s senior officer Jeyachandran said: "There is no truth that anyone was made to sit with COVID-19 patient. The person in the ambulance was not COVID-19 positive and this whole mock exercise was done only to create awareness that people should sit at home and follow the lockdown rules.", , Copyright © AFP 2017-2020.  All rights reserved.  Users can access and consult this website and use the share features available for personal, private, and non-commercial purposes.  Any other use, in particular any reproduction, communication to the public or distribution of the content of this website, in whole or in part, for any other purpose and/or by any other means, without a specific licence agreement signed with AFP, is strictly prohibited.  The subject matter depicted or included via links within the Fact Checking content is provided to the extent necessary for correct understanding of the verification of the information concerned.  AFP has not obtained any rights from the authors or copyright owners of this third party content and shall incur no liability in this regard.  AFP and its logo are registered trademarks.
This video shows a police drill in India during the coronavirus pandemic | AFP Fact Check