By Pascal Ibe
Claim
An X user, @Unabombaar, shared a video showing the collapse of a building collapse in an overcrowded place and claimed it was during the sharing of bread in Ogun State, Nigeria’s Southwest.
Verdict
The claim is MISLEADING. The video is unconnected to any recent incident in Ogun State, in Nigeria’s South-West
Deep and thorough findings showed that this video was an incident that occurred in India on 17th July 2024. This incident happened while tazia processions were being taken out on Muharram in Gonda, Pratapgarh, Ballia, Sant Kabir Nagar, and Kannauj districts in India.
Full Text
An X user, @Unabombaar has shared a video showing the collapse of a building collapse in an overcrowded place and claimed it was during the sharing of bread in Ogun State, Nigeria’s Southwest.
He claimed that this was a result of an alleged unending hunger in Nigeria’s South-West region.
He posted the video with a caption that reads, “A bakery at Ogun announced that they are giving bread for free. So, because of the “Ebinpawa” pandemic in Yoruba land in the South West, the crowd was too much to control. People climbed on the roof of the bakery just to beg for bread and they ended up destroying the building.”
The post has generated over 776k views, more than 570 reposts, and over 1k likes, according to X analytics.
Verification
This Fact Checker subjected keyframes from the video to a Google Image Reverse Search and the results first led him to a YouTube channel that posted the video on 18th July 2024
The YouTube channel, Azeez Khan Vlogs shared with a caption that reads, “Bellary Muharram Sarvar hussain Alvida Bellary #ballari #muharram #shorts”.
FACTWATCH Nigeria observed that this video by Azeez Khan Vlogs has already garnered over 17.5k views since last year.
To know the exact place where the YouTube channel that shared the video base, this Fact Checker pasted the video link from the YouTube channel into an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool, MW Metadata, which displays detailed metadata on YouTube videos, as well as the channel on which they’re posted. It was discovered that the YouTube channel, Azeez Khan Vlogs is based in India.
To ascertain what happened, this Fact Checker extracted a caption from another YouTube channel that also posted the video ,that reads, “Bellary Muharram incident 2024//Sarvar house #ballari #sortsvideo #ytshorts“.
Results from this simple Google search using the YouTube caption of the video led FACTWATCH Nigeria to reports of the incident by local media organizations in India.
According to the publication by Telegraph India on 17th July 2024, four people died and 26 were injured in separate incidents while tazia processions were being taken out on Muharram in Gonda, Pratapgarh, Ballia, Sant Kabir Nagar, and Kannauj districts, India police said.
In Gonda, a 12-year-old child was electrocuted to death and five others sustained injuries of current in separate processions.
Ashraf, 12, died in the Tarabganj area of Gonda when a fixture of the tazia came in contact with a high-tension wire. Another named Riyasat sustained burns in the same incident.
Both were rushed to a medical college, where Ashraf was declared dead while Riyasat’s condition was stated to be stable.
In another incident in Telianpurwa village of the Itiathok area, four people were electrocuted when a tazia touched an overhead power cable.
Babu, Akram, Gaya Prasad, and Munni Devi were rushed to a hospital where they are undergoing treatment.
In Pratapgarh, 25-year-old Mohd Wasif died when a tazia touched the high-tension wire at Babuganj Railway Gate, police said.
Electrocution killed one and injured three in Bharatpur village in the Khalilabad Police Station area.
The deceased was Mohammad Ali, 24, a native of Bhatpar village.
In Ballia’s Bharatpur Chhapra village, four children were injured when the roof they were watching the procession from collapsed.
In Kannauj, in an area under the Sakrava Police Station jurisdiction, a child died, and 14 were injured when the roof of a house collapsed on the people gathered to watch the Muharram procession.
In Bahraich, an interfaith clash broke out over the route of the tazia procession.
See other similar reports that corroborate this story here and here.
Further findings showed that this was a large crowd who gathered for the Bellary Muharram incident in Ballari, India. Muharram is a sacred month in Islam.
FACTWATCH Nigeria observed that the language spoken in the video wasn’t a Yoruba language.
Conclusion
The claim that the video showing the collapse of a building collapse in an overcrowded place occurred during the sharing of bread in Ogun State, Nigeria’s Southwest, recently is MISLEADING as findings indicated that the incident happened in India in 2024.
