Fact Check: Video of Eid prayers at Moscow mosque shared as Muslims blocking road during Namaz in France
India Today
A video purportedly from France went viral on social media, showing Muslims blocking streets for prayer. India Today's Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim to be misleading.
A few days after believers around the world celebrated Eid-ul-Fitr, a video has gone viral on social media claiming to be from France, where Muslims blocked the streets for their prayers.
The 30-second viral video captured a few hundred Muslims praying on the road. The chanting of Azan is audible in the background of the video.
A Hindi caption alongside this video read, "25 years ago, France was memorising the lesson of 'Liberal-Humanity'... Now it is getting a 'lesson'. Common French citizens have no space to walk."
Archived versions of the videos can be seen here and here.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found this claim to be misleading as the video is not from France but the Russian capital Moscow. It shows prayers during Eid-ul-Fitr.
A reverse search of the keyframes from the viral video led us to an image tweeted in Russian in 2013. When we compared the two screenshots, we discovered that they are from the same location.
The caption of the tweet mentioned that it was from Moscow. However, no other details were available here. Then we ran a reverse search of the image posted on Twitter on Yandex. The Russian search engine took us to a higher resolution image of the same event on a Russian website. There, we noticed signage on an advertising board that had a contact number with the area code "495".
