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PeakMetrics / Fact Checks

Crime & justice fact checks

Explore claims publishers have checked about crime & justice. Read their original ratings and follow the evidence.

6,836 published reviews in this topic

FACTLYCrime & justice

Pictures of a Hindu woman named Ankita Vijay who was brutally assaulted by her Muslim boyfriend Abdul

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The post identified the injured woman in a collage as Ankita Vijay and described her as a Hindu woman assaulted by her Muslim boyfriend Abdul, framing the incident as “love jihad.” FACTLY’s review identifies the woman in those pictures as Malayalam actress Anicka Vikhraman, not Ankita Vijay. It says Vikhraman shared the images on Facebook while accusing her ex-boyfriend, Anoop Pillai, of abuse and assault. To check the images’ provenance, the review reports conducting a reverse image search. It says one image appeared in an Indian Express article dated 7 March 2023, which identified the woman as Vikhraman and reported her allegations against her ex-boyfriend. The review also notes that several news websites covered the pictures and allegations in March 2023. The review concludes that the claim misidentifies both the woman and the accused person: it says Pillai is not Muslim and that the incident has no communal angle. It also records that Pillai denied Vikhraman’s allegations, claiming she injured herself while inebriated and posted the pictures to spread false propaganda against him. The excerpt does not independently resolve the competing allegations of abuse; its evidence addresses the identity and communal framing of the images.

PA MediaCrime & justice

Image of Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison

Publisher’s rating: The image is an AI-generated image. The person who is believed to have generated this image said that they used Midjourney, an artificial intelligence (AI) system which creates images that its users request.

FACTLYCrime & justice

Video from the funeral procession of gangster-turned-politician Atiq Ahmed’s son Asad Ahmed

Publisher’s rating: FALSE

The claim concerns a social-media video described as showing the funeral procession of Asad Ahmed, son of Atiq Ahmed, who was killed in a police encounter in Jhansi on 13 April 2023. FACTLY’s review says the video instead shows the procession for Maulana Syed Muhammad Rabey Hasani Nadwi, president of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, who died on 13 April 2023. The review therefore concludes that the video was misidentified. To investigate, FACTLY reports using reverse image search on screenshots from the circulating video. It found videos with similar visuals posted by users who identified them as footage of Nadwi’s funeral prayers, then found further matching visuals on the SahilOnlineTvnews and Mufti Badar official YouTube channels. The review says those channels identified the footage as Nadwi’s funeral procession in Lucknow. FACTLY also compared the disputed footage with separate visuals that it identifies as the procession for Asad Ahmed. Its stated conclusion rests on the match between the circulating video and footage identified as Nadwi’s procession, rather than Asad’s. The review notes that Nadwi died after a prolonged illness and that Asad died in a police encounter; these are distinct deaths and processions, despite occurring on the same date.