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| - Fact Check: This 2-year-old video of conman 'faith healer' getting arrested is NOT from Punjab but from Pakistan
A video claiming to show the police arresting a Muslim faith healer was found to be false.
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India Today Fact Check
This 2020 video is from Sialkot, Pakistan. It showed cops there busting the same scam as mentioned in the claim. This video, however, is now being circulated with hashtags related to the Jahangirpuri communal violence.
Following communal violence in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri, a video of the police arresting a Muslim faith healer who allegedly duped people by talking from inside a grave is making the rounds on social media.
Several people on Facebook and Twitter shared this video with Hindi captions that loosely read, “The Punjab police arrested a Muslim faith healer from an underground shelter from where he used to dupe people by responding as if from a real grave.” Many tagged the viral video with hashtags like #DelhiRiots.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found this 2020 video is from Sialkot, Pakistan. It showed cops there busting the same scam as mentioned in the claim.
The viral posts are archived here and here.
AFWA probe
With the help of a reverse image search, we found this viral video on a Punjabi YouTube channel uploaded in 2021. As per this video, the incident took place in Sialkot in Pakistan in 2020.
Taking this as a clue, we ran another search and found multiple Pakistani YouTube channels that ran this news along with the same viral video February 2020.
As per these news clips, this incident took place in Sialkot, Pakistan, where a faith healer was arrested by the police from an underground shelter allegedly for duping people by claiming that he would stay alive beneath a grave for 40 days and would respond to people.
According to Pakistani news portals the faith healer named Sammer Abbas was arrested from the Wanjal area of Sialkot by the cops at Saddar police station. This incident was also reported on the ARY News website.
Another Facebook page that features news content showed visuals of how this peer pretended to be buried in a grave for 40 days. But he was taken out of the grave by the police on the third day and was arrested. It was found that the grave was a well-equipped underground shelter with proper air ventilation. Adequate food and a comfortable bed were also available inside the shelter.
Thus, we concluded that the video that went viral in the backdrop of recent communal tension in Delhi is about two years old and from Pakistan.
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