An illegal arms manufacturing racket was busted in Uttar Pradesh’s Malihabad during a late-night raid on June 26. The accused in the case, Hakeem Salauddin, reportedly manufactured and sold illegal firearms from his home while posing as a traditional healer. Six pistols, seven airguns, one rifle, 18 live cartridges, and the skin of a prohibited deer species were seized from the house of Salauddin, who is suspected to have ties to Pakistan and Dubai.

Now, visuals allegedly from the raid have begun making the rounds on social media. However, a video and a photo — both featuring giant caches of arms and ammunition — going viral are old and unrelated to the case. Let’s have a look at both.

A peek into Salauddin’s house?

The video shows bundles of cash along with arms and ammunition being recovered from a building. Sharing it, one person wrote, “3,000 guns and 20 sacks containing 50,000 cartridges along with $ recovered from Hakim Salauddin.”

Reverse-searching keyframes from the viral video led us to social media posts from August 202, featuring a longer version of the video. The caption of one such post stated that weapons belonging to the United States were seized by the Taliban. This video therefore predates the Malihabad raid by around four years.

We then found a New York Times report about the viral video, dated August 16, 2021. After the fall of Afghanistan’s government on August 15, 2021, Taliban insurgents seized power and subsequently showed off newly acquired weapons and vehicles.

The video in question, along with some other footage, showed weapons and armoured vehicles — most of which were supplied by Washington — in the hands of Taliban fighters.

US, not UP

The photo going viral shows a huge number of guns and rifles arranged on the ground inside a room. The text inside the picture read: “3,000 guns and 20 sacks containing 50,000 cartridges recovered from Hakim Salauddin house in Lucknow.”

Using reverse search, we found the same photo in an X post from 2017, ruling out the possibility of it being linked to the recent raid in Malihabad.

We then found a similar photo in an article from May 2013. According to it, police departments in Iowa held a “gun take back” event where people could voluntarily surrender weapons and ammunition they no longer required, to the Division of Criminal Investigation Crime Lab.

DCI Criminalistics Laboratory is located in Ankeny, Iowa, and provides forensic services for all criminal justice partners in the US state.

We found a video of the firearms section of the crime lab, uploaded by the Iowa Department of Public Safety’s YouTube channel. In it, the guns arranged in the same order as seen in the viral photo can be seen at around the 4.11-mark.

Thus, it is clear that unrelated, old visuals from Afghanistan and the US were falsely shared as visuals from a Malihabad raid.

– Ends