Fact-check: Viral video falsely links Punjab education minister to sexual assault allegations
The video was actually recorded four years ago by a man named Usman Mirza, who assaulted a man and a woman at gunpoint in a flat in Islamabad
Updated Monday Oct 21 2024
Shortly after allegations of rape on a college campus in Lahore surfaced this week, a clip — viewed over two million times online — began circulating, accusing Punjab's education minister of sexually assaulting a woman and a man.
The claim is false. The video is three years old and unrelated to the recent allegations of rape.
Claim
On October 12, social media posts began circulating, alleging that a young woman was raped at the private Punjab Group of Colleges in Lahore, Punjab. Soon after, social media users began posting a 54-second video in which a man can be seen physically and verbally abusing a man and a woman.
The posts claimed that the perpetrator in the video was Punjab’s School Education Minister, Rana Sikander Hayat, who was assaulting the woman and man for protesting against the government.
“In Pakistan’s Punjab province, Education Minister Rana Sikandar Hayat in the Maryam Nawaz government stripped a girl and raped her in front of the camera,” one account on X (formerly Twitter) wrote on October 17. “The crime of that girl and her partner was that they had participated in the protest against the rape of a girl in Lahore.”
The post had been shared 2,500 times and liked 3,800 times at the time of writing, with 260,500 views.
Note: Geo Fact Check will not repost the video as it was recorded and circulated without the consent of those involved.
Identical claims accusing the minister have been widely shared on X and Facebook.
Fact
The man in the video is not Rana Sikander Hayat. The video was actually recorded four years ago in November 2020 by Usman Mirza, who assaulted a man and a woman at gunpoint in a flat in Islamabad.
After the Mirza’s video went viral, he and his accomplices were arrested and later sentenced to life by a district court in 2022.
The incident was reported by several local and international news outlets back then, which can be accessed here, here, and here:
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