Fact Check: Punjab Cop Smoking Weed In Viral Video Is From Pakistan, Not India
Fact Check: A viral video falsely claims to show a Punjab Police officer running from a reporter after being caught smoking weed. Fact-checking reveals the incident occurred in Pakistan's Punjab.
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Fact Check: A viral video (here, here, and here) on social media allegedly shows a police officer in Punjab running away from a news reporter after he was caught smoking weed in an auto-rickshaw. Applauding the reporter’s efforts, social media users are sharing this video claiming that in Kejriwal’s Punjab, even police officers have become drug addicts. We fact-check this claim through this article.
An archived version of this post can be found here.
Claim: Video of a police officer in Punjab running away from a news reporter after he was caught smoking weed.
Fact: This video was filmed in Pakistan’s Punjab and uploaded to Facebook by a media page called ‘SA Times.’ There are no recent news reports of such an incident from Punjab, India. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search and found a news report published by the Free Press Journal on this video. The headline of the report, which contains screenshots from the viral video (sourced from ‘X’), reads “Pakistan: Punjab Cop Flees After Reporter Records Him Smoking ‘Charas’ In Commercial Vehicle; Video Viral.” The report describes the visuals seen in the viral video.
Taking this as a hint, we performed an additional keyword search and found a few other news reports about this incident published by ABP Live, Asianet, and India TV. They also stated that this incident took place in Pakistan’s Punjab. Per these reports, the leader of the PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf)party shared this video on ‘X,’ with a caption that translated from Urdu reads ‘A Punjab Police jawan was caught red-handed selling and consuming hashish.’
پنجاب پولیس کا جوان چرس بیچتے اور پیتے ہوئے رنگے ہاتھوں پکڑا گیا ۔۔۔۔۔۔۔۔ pic.twitter.com/tn8j4r1v7A
— Fatima PTI (@FatimaPTI_IK) December 20, 2024
To verify this, we performed another keyword search that led us to the original and extended version of the viral video posted (here and here) on Facebook by “SA Times,” an independent media organization based in Pakistan.
In this four-minute video, we can see a reporter approaching an auto, where he finds two people smoking weed (Charas). One of them is a police officer. We can see the flag of Pakistan on the officer’s uniform.
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The video also captured the Registration number printed on the auto-rickshaw, LEU 17 1088. Registration marks or numbers of Indian vehicles are in a format different from this one. According to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways’ Motor Vehicles (High-Security Registration Plates) Order, 2018, the registration number in India contains a two-letter unique state code in the beginning. But, in the viral video, the auto rickshaw’s number plate contains a three-letter code, LEU (the name Punjab is written on its side with a logo). The two-letter code assigned by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways(MoRTH) to Punjab, India, is PB (according to this notification issued by MoRTH).
This makes it clear that the number plate does not belong to a vehicle registered in Punjab, India. You can find a few Punjab (Pakistan) vehicle registration plates here and here. One of them, postedby a user on ‘pakwheels.com,’ is a number plate from Lahore (code-LEI). You can see the difference between the two in the following collage.
Additionally, the reporter seen in the video, Nadeem Abbas mentions that the officer was running towards Cant. We can see him running towards a railway station. We then searched for Cant railway station in Pakistan, Punjab, and found that he was referring to the Lahore Cantonment railway station. A few photos (here and here) uploaded by users on Google Maps have similarities with the visuals observed in the viral video.
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Further, we performed a keyword search to check if such an incident of a police officer getting caught smoking weed/cannabis took place in the Indian side of Punjab. We did not find any recent credible news reports.
To sum up, a video filmed in Punjab, Pakistan, is falsely shared as visuals of a police officer in Punjab, India, caught while smoking weed.
This story was originally published by Factly, as part of the Shakti Collective. Except for the headline and excerpt, this story has not been edited by ABP LIVE staff.
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