DigitEye India Fact Checkers
A video has gone viral depicting a burnt church with a claim that it was done as a revenge for the New Zealand firing in Pakistan. On Friday, March 15, 2019 an Australian white man fired indiscriminately at Al Nou and Linwood Mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50 and injuring another 50 people. He had livestreamed the entire attack on social media too.
The shooting incident involved several Pakistani and Indian migrants who were present in the mosque at that time and succumbed to the firing from the man. In less than a week, another video has surfaced on social media claiming that a church in Pakistan was burnt in revenge against the Christchurch incident.
In response to the attack on the mosques in New Zealand, Islamists burned the Christian church in Pakistan. pic.twitter.com/jN8Ad9NPlG
— Free Tommy (@Dontshutusupp) March 18, 2019
The video at the very first glance lasted for a few seconds on Facebook and Twitter. Several twitter users have pointed it out for fact checking. When Digiteye India tried to check the origin of the video with frame-wise check on Youtube using Dataviewer and it threw up information on a similar video footage that was part of a 2013 church burning incident in Egypt.
Here’s the original 7-minute long video, which is not obviously from Pakistan. It was from a series of anti-Christian riots which took place in Egypt in 2013, when more than 25 churches had been attacked across the country.
The church in the video was an ancient ‘Coptic Orthodox Church’ that was burnt by rioters in the city of Sohag, Egypt, in August 2013. Here is the original video:
This video on the YouTube channel of a news agency called ‘MidEast Christian News (MCN)’ was uploaded on August 29, 2013 with the caption that reads: “MCN obtained video of the attacks targeting Sohag Diocese in Upper Egypt. The video reveals the details of the attack and burning of the church and its services to the building, after dismantling of the Brotherhood sit-ins on August 14.”
Conclusion: The video that showed as a Pakistani church on fire was misleading and fabricated to convey misinformation. Our rating of the claim is ????? which means Totally False.
