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| - Fact Check: New Pak leader slapped in public? NO, this clip is from 2019
A video showing a man supposedly slapping a political leader at a recent public gathering turned out to be half a decade old.
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India Today Fact Check
This video does not show a recent incident. It is from a public gathering in Pakistan in 2019.
Pakistan’s newly formed Parliament elected Shehbaz Sharif as Prime Minister for a second time on March 3 after a coalition government was formed following national elections that were marred by allegations of large-scale rigging. The declaration was met with loud protests from the Sunni Ittehad Council, a party backed by Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. Lawmakers reportedly called for Khan’s release and continued to protest throughout Sharif’s speech.
A video of a public gathering is now making the rounds on social media, in which a man shaking hands with people gets slapped. Those sharing the clip, claimed that this was a recent incident where a man expressed his anger against a political leader by slapping him.
One person tweeted the video writing, “Spit, slap and stick movement has been started with Lotas. This is just the beginning,” along with hashtags such as “Mandate Belongs To Kaptan”, referring to Imran Khan, and “Free Leader Of The Nation”. Defectors are often colloquially referred to as “lotas” in Pakistan.
India Today Fact Check found that this video does not show a recent incident, it is from 2019.
Our Probe
Reverse searching keyframes of the viral video led us to the same video shared on multiple YouTube channels back in April 2019. This made it clear that the video does not show a recent incident.
The descriptions of these YouTube videos stated that the clip featured a young man slapping a PTI minister in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. Some social media posts also added that this young man was unemployed, and hence angry at the minister.
News outlet “Al Arabiya Urdu” also shared the video on April 21, 2019, titled in Urdu: “During a ceremony in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the provincial minister was slapped hard by a young man who was angry with the performance of the provincial government.”
We then found a 2019 news report about this incident that said the video did not feature a political leader. Quoting officials of the Prime Minister's office, it said that the video showed Afghani refugees getting into a scuffle with locals in the Mohmand Tribal district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
While we could not independently verify the location of the video, it is clear that it does not show a recent outburst of people against political leaders in Pakistan.
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