Video of Brazil murder falsely shared as Christian woman killed in Manipur

By: Uzma Afreen
July 31 2023

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(Trigger Warning: This story contains descriptions of distressing visuals, and mentions of violence. Reader discretion is advised.)

Context

A video showing a woman with her hands tied and mouth gagged being beaten to death is being shared on social media with the claim that it shows a Christian woman being killed by a mob in Manipur. “Video of Christian woman brutally murdered by RSS mob,” the caption of the viral video read. Though the tweet has now been deleted, an archive shows it had over 1,000 views. The archive of the post can be found here.

The video is being shared after the gruesome video of sexual assault that emerged from Manipur, and other videos of violence during the ongoing unrest in the Indian state. However, this video is old and unrelated to the violence in the Indian state. 

In Fact

On running a reverse image search on a keyframe of the viral video, we came across the video published on a Chinese news website named See Hua News on September 14, 2020. This news article falsely claimed, "It is reported that a Malaysian policewoman was murdered and the police vowed to find out the rumor spreader." The same video was shared in September 2020 purporting to be that of an Indian-origin Malaysian police officer. The report quoted local officials in Malaysia as refuting these claims and noted that this video was likely from Brazil.

We ran some keywords in Portuguese and found a video report on the incident by Jornal Jangadeiro, a Brazilian news organization, published on Facebook on October 3, 2020. This video showed images of the victim and blurred screengrabs from the viral video. On translating the report, we found that a woman was was found dead on August 26, 2020. In the video, police delegate Marcio Lopes stated that before being murdered, the woman was kidnapped and kept in captivity in the Brazilian state of Ceara. 

According to Lopes, the investigation showed that the accused found evidence of the woman having a relationship with members of an enemy faction. The members of the faction plotted her murderin an online meeting and the crime was filmed. 

We found similar reports on the same incident by local news websites in Brazil. One such report by CN7 stated, "(Victim) was bound with ropes, gagged and taken by force, at gunpoint, to the banks of the ri ver near Rua Coronel Fabriciano, and there she was cruelly executed." The report also stated that 17 women were murdered in Ceará in the month of August.

The murder was also reported by local news channel TV Cidade Fortaleza on October 2, 2020, with the headline, "Mulher é morta com golpes de machado e execução é transmitida ao vivo." (Woman is killed with axe blows and execution is broadcasted live). This video report also published a blurred version of the video. The shows that this video is not from India, and unrelated to the violence in Manipur. 

The Verdict

The video is from Brazil, where a 23-year-old woman was brutally killed by a criminal faction in August 2020, and is not related to Manipur. Hence, we have marked the claim as false.