A video purports to show a police officer being beaten has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter alongside a claim that the assault at a temple in India was sparked by the officer’s attempt to enforce a nationwide novel coronavirus lockdown.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:, The post’s Hindi caption translates to English as: “The law is being thrashed inside a temple. The policeman was assaulted only because he was enforcing lockdown inside a temple. Will the police take action against them as well? Where is Kejriwal now, he should lodge an FIR at least. Where is the media, where is everyone now?", Kejriwal refers to Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal., The video was also shared alongside a similar claim\xa0on Facebook here, here, here and here and on Twitter here, here, here and here., India\xa0has been\xa0under lockdown since Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced nationwide restrictions on March 24, 2020, in a bid to curb\xa0the spread of the novel coronavirus, AFP reported here., However, the claim made alongside the video is false., A reverse image search on Google using\xa0keyframes extracted with InVID-WeVerify, a video verification tool, found a longer version of the video published here on a YouTube channel named CWE, or Continental Wrestling Entertainment, on June 18, 2019,\xa0months before the novel coronavirus outbreak., The clip\xa0in the misleading Facebook post starts at the one-minute 51-second mark of\xa0the YouTube video., , “Singham dubey interrupt shastri while doing puja,”\xa0the caption of the YouTube video\xa0reads., Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading Facebook post (L) and the YouTube video (R):, According to CWE\s website, it\xa0was founded in January 2015 as the “first professional wrestling school in India” by Indian-born wrestler Dalip Singh Rana aka "The Great Khali"., CWE confirmed that the video\xa0in the misleading posts was staged and produced in Jalandhar, a city in the northern Indian state of Punjab., “This video was posted a year ago on our YouTube channel. It is a staged fight and the video was shot in Jalandhar only for entertainment purposes,” one of the academy members told AFP by phone on April 7, 2020., "The two characters mentioned in the video’s caption --\xa0Singham Dubey and Shastri --\xa0can also be seen in several other videos on CWEs YouTube channel.", Below is a screenshot of those mentions on the channel:, , , 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 was uploaded to an Indian wrestling-themed YouTube channel in June 2019 | AFP Fact Check