Old Bengaluru video used to falsely claim Muslim man ‘mixed urine in popcorn'

Context

A video showing police arresting a man from a crowd has gone viral on social media. Several users shared the video claiming that a Muslim man replaced salt with urine while making popcorn. The video shows a person speaking to the police in Kannada, after which they proceed to arrest a young man and take him away. One of the posts, written in Hindi, reads, "After spitting, now urine jihad. In Bengaluru, a popcorn stall owner has been caught red-handed making popcorn by mixing urine instead of salt!." A bottle full of yellow liquid can be seen seen in the video. The tweet has garnered over 64k views, and over 3,000 likes and retweets. An archived version of the post can be found here.

However, the claim is false. An incident that took place in 2022 in Bengaluru, Karnataka, where the police arrested a man for allegedly spitting on oil before making popcorn, has been misinterpreted.

In Fact

We discovered that the viral video is a news report by TV9 Kannada. We found that the video was published on the organization's YouTube channel on June 11, 2022, with a title in Kannada which translates as: "Lalbagh: Locals accuse popcorn sellers." 

In the video, a man shouting alleges that he had witnessed the accused, a popcorn seller, spitting in the bottle of oil before making the popcorn. The accuse denied this allegation and suggested asking other shopkeepers for confirmation. At the one-minute mark, the man shouting says to a bystander, “He has spit three times and when asked he is saying sorry sir. He is making popcorn and for that oil he has spat 3 times. He is Muslim.”

According to a report by The News Minute dated June 14, 2022, the accused, Nawaz Pasha, was preparing his stall when a few passersby allegedly saw him biting open an oil packet and claimed that Pasha was spitting into the oil before making popcorn. The mob became furious and tried to attack him. According to the report, a police officer was present and intervened when he saw the crowd. The police took Pasha to the police station and took suo moto action, registered a case at Siddapura police station, and arrested him. Pasha said that he didn't spit and that he was merely biting the cover of the packet.

The News Minute spoke with Pasha after he was released on bail. In the video interview, he said that he had torn open a packet of oil with his hands and kept the torn piece in his mouth. While he was pouring the oil into a bottle, a mob began accusing him of spitting on the oil. A man approached him and asked for his name, after which the man started shouting that he is a Muslim and he spat on the oil. 

Logically Facts accessed a copy of the complaint. Pasha was arrested for negligent act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life, malignant act likely to spread infection, adulteration of food or drink intended for sale, and sale of noxious food or drink.

The bottle seen in the viral video is the bottle of oil that Pasha was accused of having spit into and is being used to further the claim that he mixed urine in popcorn.

Police also confirmed that the incident had no link with urine. Hanumanth K Bhajantri, a Police Inspector at Bengaluru’s Siddapura police station, told Logically Facts, "It is wrong information. He was not using urine."

The Verdict

An unrelated incident from 2022 which took place in Lalbagh, Bangalore, was misinterpreted to falsely claim that a Muslim man used urine to make popcorn. In reality, the man in the viral video was accused of spitting in oil before making popcorn, and was arrested by the police. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.