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| - Fact Check: Video of Eid prayers at Moscow mosque shared as Muslims blocking road during Namaz in France
A video purportedly from France went viral on social media, showing Muslims blocking streets for prayer. India Today's Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim to be misleading.
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India Today Fact Check
This is not a video from France but Moscow, Russia. It was recorded in front of Moscow Cathedral Mosque during Eid prayers. There is a ban on public Namaz on the streets of France.
A few days after believers around the world celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr, a video has gone viral on social media claiming to be from France, where Muslims blocked the streets for their prayers.
The 30-second viral video captured a few hundred Muslims praying on the road. The chanting of Azan is audible in the background of the video.
A Hindi caption alongside this video read, "25 years ago, France was memorising the lesson of 'Liberal-Humanity'... Now it is getting a 'lesson'. Common French citizens have no space to walk."
Archived versions of the videos can be seen here and here.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found this claim to be misleading as the video is not from France but the Russian capital Moscow. It shows prayers during Eid-ul-Fitr.
AFWA Probe
A reverse search of the keyframes from the viral video led us to an image tweeted in Russian in 2013. When we compared the two screenshots, we discovered that they are from the same location.
The caption of the tweet mentioned that it was from Moscow. However, no other details were available here. Then we ran a reverse search of the image posted on Twitter on Yandex. The Russian search engine took us to a higher resolution image of the same event on a Russian website. There, we noticed signage on an advertising board that had a contact number with the area code "495".
Further investigation showed that Moscow has three area codes—495, 498, and 499—to distinguish the neighbourhoods.
A mosque-like structure with a golden tomb was also visible in the viral video. We ran its screenshots on Google Lens to retrieve more details. The results suggested this to be the Moscow Cathedral Mosque.
A comparison of an image of the Moscow Cathedral Mosque from "Alamy" and the screenshot from the video confirmed they are both images of the same building.
We searched for more keywords to find out whether Eid was celebrated in front of the mosque this year. A photo gallery published by "The Moscow Times" on May 3, 2022, carried pictures of devotees offering their Eid prayers from the same area.
Meanwhile, another probe showed that the French government in 2011 had banned public prayers on the streets. Reports by "Reuters" and "BBC" on the development can be read here.
While we could not pinpoint when the viral video was shot, we were able to confirm that it was from Russia and not France.
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