After students from the Jamia Hafsa seminary in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad staged demonstrations calling for the release of their arrested principal, an old video was viewed hundreds of thousands of times in posts falsely claiming it showed police manhandling the female protesters. The video has in fact circulated in posts and reports about the “brutality” police employed in breaking up protests against the demolition of homes in Sindh province in November 2022.
“This injustice is being done to the students of Jamia Hafsa, Lal Masjid,” reads the Urdu-language caption to a Facebook video shared on February 27, 2025.
Viewed over 146,000 times, the video shows police officers shoving, beating and hauling hijab-wearing women into a police van.
Screenshot of the false post, taken on March 7, 2025
Similar videos were shared hundreds of times elsewhere on Facebook.
The posts surfaced as female students from the Jamia Hafsa seminary, connected to the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad, staged protest sit-ins in the Pakistan capital that blocked traffic following the arrest of their principal Ume Hassan on February 19 (archived link).
Hassan, the wife of the Red Mosque’s radical cleric Abdul Aziz, was arrested for an armed attack on police and government staff (archived link).
As tensions simmered following Hassan’s arrest, more than 150 police officers enforced a blockade on the roads around the Red Mosque — the scene of a bloody week-long siege in July 2007 that left more than 100 dead as the military sought to pacify the mosque and arrest its leaders (archived here and here).
The footage circulating online, however, does not show police beating and arresting Jamia Hafsa students.
Mujahid colony protest
The police officers in the falsely shared footage are wearing vests labelled “Sindh Police”, and their uniforms correspond to those seen in an AFP photograph taken in November 2022.
A combination of keyword and reverse image searches led to the same footage posted by Pakistani politicians Mohsin Dawar and Qasim Khan Suri and a report from local outlet Soch published in November 2022 (archived here, here and here).
“The brutality with which the police in Karachi attacked women protesting against the demolition of their homes in Mujahid Colony is shameful,” reads Dawar’s X post, which was published on November 21, 2022.
The neighbourhood in Karachi is more than 1,130 kilometres (700 miles) from Islamabad.
Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (left) and the footage posted by politicians on X in November 2022 (right)
The demolition of homes were part of an anti-encroachment drive led by the Karachi Development Authority, who claimed the structures were illegally occupying state land (archived here and here).
Local media reported at the time that the homes of more than 400 families had been demolished, and residents said they were subjected to police brutality (archived link).
“Pakistani authorities frequently use colonial-era laws and policies to forcibly evict low-income residents, shop owners, and street vendors to enable public and private development projects,” read a May 2024 report by Human Rights Watch (archived link).
It urged authorities to reform its land laws and ensure no one is made homeless due to eviction, and to make sure there are adequate compensation and resettlement options.
