The Verdict False The FIR copy identifies the two individuals as Ahmed Mohammed Hussain and Shaikh Azharuddin. |
What is the claim?
A video of three men arguing inside an aircraft is being shared with a claim that a group of Muslim men physically assaulted a Hindu man. In the video, two of them are first seen having a heated exchange while the air hostess is trying to intervene. Soon after, a few more join in and start thrashing the other person.
An X user posted the video and captioned it, “Oh, Foolish Hindus, When Will You Change.?" "There were five Muslims on a flight, while the rest were mostly Hindus and people of other religions. When one Muslim started fighting with a Hindu and began hitting him, the other Muslims joined in and also started attacking the Hindu. However, no other Hindus came forward to support him (sic)," the caption added. At the time of writing this story, the post had received 12,000 likes and 5,900 retweets.
Archived versions of similar posts can be seen here and here.
However, we found that the claim is false. This incident actually occurred on December 26, 2022, on a flight departing from Bangkok, Thailand, to Kolkata in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. The two passengers involved were identified as Ahmed Mohammed Hussain and Shaikh Azharuddin.
What had happened?
Upon conducting a keyword search, we found multiple news reports about the incident. NDTV, the English-language news channel, posted the same video on its YouTube channel (archived here) on December 29, 2022.
Speaking to the channel, Alok Kumar, another passenger on the same THAI Smile flight, claimed that the dispute was over one of the involved passengers refusing to straighten his seat back in line with the safety protocol despite repeated requests from the air hostess.
Additionally, The Hindu reported that after the footage of the in-flight assault went viral, the Bureau of Civil Aviation (BCAS) filed a complaint against all passengers involved at a police station in Kolkata. The passenger who was beaten up was identified as Ahmed Mohammed Hussain, and the passenger who can be seen punching him was identified as Shaikh Azharuddin.
The news report added that the airline’s report to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation noted that Hussain refused to follow the crew's safety instructions. On December 29, 2022, the airline also issued an apology (archived here) about the incident.
Furthermore, Logically Facts accessed the First Information Report (FIR) filed by the BCAS regional director at Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport (NSCBI) Police Station on December 29, 2022. The FIR identifies the passengers involved as Ahmed Mohammed Hussain and Shaikh Azharuddin.
The verdict
A three-year-old video of an in-flight brawl from a THAI Smile aircraft is being shared with a false communal angle.
(This story was first published by Logically Facts and is being republished by ETV Bharat as part of Shakti Collective.)
