Fact-check: Viral video claiming to show Pakistani prisons actually filmed in Vietnam
The jail in the viral video is actually the French-era Con Dao prison in Vietnam, which was turned into a war memorial in the 1970s
Updated Wednesday Dec 18 2024
A short video clip is doing the rounds on Pakistani social media claiming that it shows the horrid conditions of prisons in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
This claim is unfounded.
Claim
On December 10, a user on X (formerly Twitter) posted a 56-second video recording of an alleged jail in Pakistan where one can see emaciated prisoners locked inside.
In the accompanying caption, the user implied that the prison shown in the video was in Pakistan, where Baloch and Pashtun were being kept.
The post had garnered 42,000 views, 850 likes, and 442 shares to date.
Similar claims can be read here and here.
Fact
The video clip is from a prison in Vietnam, not Pakistan.
Through a reverse image search, Geo Fact Check found that the jail in the viral video is actually the French-era Con Dao prison in Vietnam, which was turned into a war memorial in 1979.
Today, it contains life-size replicas of prisoners to give visitors an idea of the kind of conditions political prisoners were kept in at the facility, which was commonly referred to as “hell on earth.”
Some pictures of Con Dao can be viewed here and here.
Also, the video was fact-checked and proven to be from Vietnam by AFP Fact Check. AFP further spoke to the management board at Con Dao, who confirmed that the footage was filmed at the French Tiger Cages located in the Con Dao Special National Relic Site.
AFP’s fact check can be read here.
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