A twenty-nine-second-long video showing a group of men confronting army personnel and provoking them with machetes is being widely shared on social media claiming to show soldiers in Nagaland being ganged up by the locals before the fatal shooting that killed 14 civilians. Newschecker found the video is not related to Nagaland. It is an old video from Colombia.
An archived version of the Tweet can be accessed here.
The video shared on both Facebook and Twitter shows soldiers moving backward and firing shots on the ground in an attempt to warn the group of men who are seen ganging up against them.
The video is being shared in the backdrop of the recent killing of 14 civilians in Nagaland by the Indian army. On December 04, army personnel mistook a truck carrying local miners as insurgents and killed six people in Oting village of Mon district. Following which clashes broke out between the villagers and the security forces that led to the killing of eight more civilians and one soldier.
Twitter users shared the video with captions such as, ‘soldiers don’t fire unless attacked upon,’ and ‘notice the restraint shown by the armed soldiers,’ which has garnered tens of thousands of views since December 06.
Newschecker found the video is also shared on Facebook with similar claims.
Factcheck/Verification
To check if the claim holds water, Newschecker ran a reverse image search on several keyframes from the video on the Yandex browser.
The result led us to several posts from 2018, one of which is a Tweet by Pinzón Bueno, ambassador of Colombia to the US.
The Tweet dated January 07, 2018, carries an image that looks similar to a frame from the video.
Newschecker also found an article by El Tiempo, a Colombian daily newspaper that has carried a frame from the viral video in a report titled, ‘Prosecutor’s Office will file charges against 2 indigenous people for an incident with the military’ (Original title in Spanish: IndÃgena irá a la cárcel por amenazas con machete a un soldado).
The article dated January 14, 2018 states, a video circulated last week showed a verbal confrontation between indigenous people and army men when the former tried to enter a property in Corinto, Cauca.
Further using Spanish keywords (IndÃgena irá y amenazas in Corinto Cauca) on YouTube, Newschecker found a video posted on January 05, 2018, which is indistinguishable from the viral video claimed to be from Nagaland.
Conclusion
The video claiming to show the locals provoking army men in Nagaland is actually from Colombia.
Result: Misplaced context
Our Sources
Tweet by Pinzón Bueno
El Tiempo’s report
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