A blue-checked X user, self-identified as “Rajendra Singh” or “RS” with about 11,000 followers, routinely posts violent and graphic footage, often with misleading or false descriptions. In his profile, RS uses “Bharat,” the ancient Hindu name for India, as a location tag.
On March 28, RS shared footage showing a group of four men wearing police uniforms and armed with automatic rifles beating a fifth man in civilian clothes inside of what appears to be a private residence, a house.
There are no labels or subtitles on the video clip indicating its origins or identifying the men in it.
At the time of this writing, the video had been viewed more than 21,000 times. Several hundred X users shared, liked, commented on and bookmarked the post.
Commenting on the video, RS wrote:
“Pakistani Punjab police mercilessly beating an Afghan man, accusing him of theft.”
That is false.
There is no evidence the video shows Punjabi police officers. Reliable news outlets reported the police officers in the video were from Peshawar, far from Punjab. The reports do not mention the nationality of the alleged criminal.
On March 26, ARY News, a bilingual Urdu-English Pakistani news channel, published the same footage of the police officers beating a man.
The incident took place in the town of Hayatabad, in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, ARY News reported. The news agency identified the uniformed men as officers from the Peshawar police station.
The unit arrived at a residential house following an emergency call from a family that had locked a suspected thief inside the property. The person is suspected of involvement in other crimes, including murdering a security guard and robberies, ARY News reported, citing the police.
RS’s false description of the footage — specifically, identifying the police officers as Punjabi and the alleged criminal as an Afghan — is significant in the context of the border tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The police officers in Punjab and Peshawar did not respond to a Polygraph.info inquiry by the time of this publication.
None of RS’s recent posts on X has been marked with a community note, the platform’s way of identifying a post as untrustworthy.
