Claim: Sri Lankan ministers were stripped down, beaten and harassed by the public.
Fact: This video shows Sri Lankan inmates of an open prison who are being interrogated for allegedly attacking protesters
On May 13, 2022 several social media users in Pakistan tweeted a video showing a group of half-naked men pleading a larger crowd as the people making the video seemed to be humiliating them. This video was shared extensively on WhatsApp. Some of these posts and tweets on social media can be seen here, here, here, here and here.
However, The Current Check observed that this video was being used out of context, with the caption that it depicts Sri Lankan ministers being humiliated by the public for participating in widespread corruption.
Through a reverse image search of six different keyframes of the video, we discovered that it was first tweeted on May 10, 2022 by Sri Lankan Twitter users claiming that this was a video of prisoners who attacked the protesters at Gota Go Gama. Soon after the video was first posted on Twitter, several Sri Lankan news channels including Daily Mirror, News First and others such as NDTV also started covering it and reporting it to belong to an instance of interrogating prisoners who attacked protesters. According to a translation of the video shared by India Today it becomes clear that these prisoners were from Watareka Open Prison Camp and a jailer had taken them to the protest site. This was a protest against former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa who along with his family is on the run as Sri Lanka slips deeper into economic downfall and political turmoil.
VERDICT: FALSE [OUT OF CONTEXT]
