The Karnataka police on April 27 issued a fact check and termed the viral video, where COVID-19 patients are seen getting attacked and killed, to be fake. The video which was viral on social media and personal messaging platforms was also aired on News First Kannada news channel.
The police said the video was a combination of two clips— one where a person killing a man in a hospital bed, is not at all a COVID-19 patient. It was actually an old video shared on YouTube related to an incident from Bangladesh of May 19, 2020. The second video is of a staff member of a private hospital in Patiala thrashing a patient with depression. The Patiala police later took action regarding the incident, the police said.
The narration and the video captions which were shared on other platforms had suggested that COVID-19 patients were being killed by hospital staff for money and the incident had tken place in Karnataka.
Police have said that this video had originated from an Instagram account of Mahanayaka_kannada. “It is observed that the page has already deleted this video, and Account Admin has already apologised and clarified about the video as fake and edited by someone with malicious intent,” the police said on its fact-check website.
Police said the video was being shared with the intent of spreading fear and panic among the people. The police also put screenshots of the Instagram page moderator apologising for putting the video.
The fact-check wing of the police was launched by Director General of Police Praveen Sood in April,2020