A video of police displaying jewelry from a 2021 robbery has been shared repeatedly with the false claim that it was “recovered” during a raid on the home of a Muslim who was working as a liaison officer public at a prominent Hindu temple in India. A police spokesman told AFP they did not carry out the attack, while temple management rejected the claim and said they had never hired Muslims for the post.
The 37-second video of a table covered in jewelry has been shared Facebook on January 6, 2025.
“The Income Tax Department has recovered this huge amount of gold jewelery during a raid at the house of a Muslim jihadi woman Mubina Nishka Begum, a public relations officer appointed by the Jagan Mohan government at Tirupati Devasthanam, ” read the legend in Hindi.
Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) is an independent trust that manages various Hindu temples in South India (archive link).
Jagan Mohan Reddy is the former chief minister of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh and heads the centre-left Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party.
He has promised welfare schemes for Muslims before during his rallies and promised to keep the four percent quota of government jobs reserved for the religious minority group (archive link).
A screenshot of the fake post, taken on January 10, 2025
Urges India to align the country's official political system more closely with its majority Hindu Faith has risen rapidly since Modi was swept into office in 2014 (archive link).
This has made the country's Muslim minority of around 210 million increasingly worried about their future.
The video has been shared with similar claims elsewhere Facebook and X.
But it was actually shot in 2021 and shows jewelry recovered from a robbery.
Old video
TTD called the claim “fake news” in Instagram mail on January 5 who said that “no such Muslim person” was employed as a public relations officer (archive link).
A reverse image search on Google found a similar video of the recovered jewelry being shared X on December 20, 2021 by a local journalist (archive link).
The post said police in Vellore, a city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, had arrested a burglar who made off with the jewelery after drilling a hole through the wall of a jewelery store.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the circulating video (left) and the X video (right), with similarities highlighted by AFP:
Screenshot comparison of the rotating video (left) and the X video (right), with similarities highlighted by AFP
Further keyword searches on Google found similar images of police displaying the recovered loot published by local media outlets in December 2021 (archive links here and here).
The reports said that the Vellore police had recovered 16 kilograms of gold and diamonds from a graveyard in Odukathur, and that the suspect – identified as V Teekaraman – had entered the jewelery showroom by making a hole in its back wall.
Vellore police spokesman Murugan Siddharth told AFP on January 13 that there were no raids in the homes of temple workers.
“The video is old and shows jewelery recovered from a robbery in 2021, the claim that the police recovered it from the premises of the temple priests or any employee is false,” Siddharth told AFP.
