Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become essential today than ever before.
Claim
Nepal Police personnel ramming into the door of former minister and Nepali Congress leader Bal Krishna Khand before his arrest
Fact
The clip of cops ramming into a door shows Spanish police during 2019 operation against Catalan Separatists
A video purporting to show Nepal Police personnel ramming into the door of the residence of former Home Minister and Nepali Congress leader Bal Krishna Khand after he was implicated in the fake refugee scam is going viral on TikTok. Newschecker found the claim to be misleading.
The video is going viral at a time when the investigations into the scam to provide false documents to Nepali people ready to be registered as Bhutanese refugees for the sake of migrating to the United States have revealed the alleged links of Nepali’s senior politicians and bureaucrats.
Former Home Minister Khand, former Home Secretary Tek Narayan Pandey and security advisor to the former Home Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa Indra Jit Rai was arrested by the police, while arrest warrant have been issued against former Minister and CPN-UML leader Top Bahadur Rayamajhi in connection with the scam. However, Rayamajhi has been absconding until the time of publishing this article.
In this context, TikTok user @natureloverno1 posted a video showing a short clip of security personnel ramming into a locked wooden door followed by images of Nepali Congress leader Bal Krishna Khand. Voice-over accompanying the video presented in a news reporting style says, “The house of Bal Khand is being broken. The security personnel were monitoring the activities around Khand’s residence from early morning. And as we talk about the special arrest warrant, an official involved in the investigation informed that Khand locked his door from inside when the police entered his residence compound. When he refused to open the door even after the security personnel said they needed to talk with him, police used force to open the door and arrested him.” The news reporting style voice-over follows another voice which says, “The police had to break open the door when he refused to open the door,” while the accompanying video shows the footage of police personnel ramming the door. The archived version of the TikTok video can be seen here.
The video posted on May 11 has garnered 52.2k likes, 2008 users have shared it and 2192 users commented until the last count.
Fact Check /Verification
To check the authenticity of the claim made in the viral video, we searched for reports regarding the arrest of former Home Minister Bal Krishna Khand and found a video report published on the YouTube Channel of Galaxy 4K Television. The video report confirmed that the police had to use force to arrest Khand from his Kathmandu Maijubahal-based residence after he locked his door from inside. However, we did not find any video matching the clip showing the police personnel hitting the door.
Then, we took a keyframe from the viral video and conducted a reverse image search which threw up several results matching the viral video. The results led us to a viral image of Spanish cops failing to break a door, published in a Russian online on September 24, 2019.
Further, taking a clue from the image, we conducted a search on YouTube by using the keyword ‘Viral video of Spanish police ramming into the door’ found a video posted on the YouTube channel named ‘On Demand News’. The video descriptions, posted on September 24, 2019 revealed that the video showed Spain’s Civil Guard’s struggle to break down a door during an operation against Catalan separatists.
Thus, our findings showed that the viral video shows the Spanish Civil Guard trying to break a door back in September 2019.
Conclusion
The video allegedly showing Nepal Police personnel struggling to break the door of NC leader Bal Krishna Khand is misleading, the 2019 viral clip of cops using force is actually from Spain.
Result: False
Sources
Galaxy 4K TV /YouTube, 10 May 2023
Evening Moscow, 24 September, 2019
On Demand News /YouTube, 24 September, 2019
The Kathmandu Post, 10 May, 2019
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Sanjeeb Phuyal is the Nepali Editor of Newschecker based in Kathmandu, Nepal. He brings over a decade of experience writing and editing news. In his previous stint, he worked as online editor for The Kathmandu Post. With the growth of social media platforms—and the ever-growing competition amongst media outlets to churn out breaking news, he feels that fact-checking every piece of information has become essential today than ever before.
