A video showing soldiers beating a group of men has been circulating on social media platforms, mostly WhatsApp, with the claim that the men are kidnappers who were captured by military personnel in Nigeria. The caption that accompanied the video read:
“See Kidnappers. Waoooooooo Oh God we thank you for this progress. May our Nigerian Security operatives over power them in all nooks and crannies. May Nigeria be more peaceful than ever.”
However the video did not mention the location, date or time of the incident.
To verify the claim, The Explainer used INVID, a tool that breaks down a video into several keyframes, and subjected one of the keyframes to Google reverse image search. This led us to a website called redd.tube, which is used for posting pornographic images and videos. We found the same video on the website, which had been published since March 2023, with the caption:
“Some thugs who came to disrupt Nigeria’s presidential and national assembly elections in Lagos state were caught and beaten by the Nigerian military.”
The website referred to the group of men as electoral thugs in Lagos, although there was no concrete evidence to show if they were truly thugs. This shows that the video is an old one from 2023, that has resurfaced as a new one.
We also subjected another keyframe to Google reverse image search, which led us to several YouTube pages with the same video, but with no description or caption to explain the context.
The Explainer also visited the official Twitter handle of the Nigerian Army to check if they had posted or commented on the video, but we found no such post.
We searched for any credible media reports that could corroborate the claim that soldiers had captured and beaten kidnappers in Nigeria, but we found none.
Conclusion
Based on the available evidence, we conclude that the claim that soldiers captured and beaten kidnappers in Nigeria is false. The video is an old one from 2023, that has been recycled and mislabelled as a recent one. There is no proof that the men in the video are kidnappers.
