By Ogar Monday
Claim: A page on Facebook posted a video alleging a shootout between men of the Nigeria Police Force and a gang group.
Verdict: Misleading. The video is from a movie set.
Full Text
As Nigeria prepares for the general elections in the backdrop of worsening insecurity, citizens continue to be on the lookout for flashpoints and incidents to avoid.
So when a page on Facebook, Dreson Albert Entertainment Blog, posted a video of an alleged shootout between the police and some men in black clothing, with the caption “happening life,” followed by a crying emoji, giving the impression that the incident is real, it gathered huge reaction, turning out to be the most watched video yet on the page.
As of Sunday, January 29, 2023, the video has garnered 1.5 million views, 4.3k likes, 850 shares and 1.3k comments.
In the less than 1 minute video, four policemen and a man dressed in a grey suit seem to be after some criminals dressed in black and riding in a yellow mini-bus.
While the uniformed officers took cover in a black van while exchanging fire with the men in the yellow bus, the man in a grey suit moves towards them and seems to be hit by a bullet.
The video generated different reactions from several responders.
Comrade-Oghene Emmanuel said, “Sometimes I just feel for the Nigeria Police. See them in a crossfire front line without any bulletproof vest. May God continue to protect them and help them to crack down on all criminal gangs.”
Another commentator, Basil Ovu, believing the video to be true, blamed the policeman who seemed to have been shot in the video for being careless.
“How can the guy in a suit expose himself so blatantly? The policemen in the van were more circumspect, not to mention that he was holding an ordinary pistol that was practically useless judging by the distance between him and the targets. May we never use our hands to kill ourselves.”
But Tolu King was skeptical about the authenticity of the video. “This is fake considering the environment; you could see people still sitting down as if nothing is happening. If it were to be real at the sound of a gunshot, the whole place must scatter,” he said.
The heightened gun violence in the country has led many citizens to be security conscious, which is why the video generated so many reactions and why we are choosing to fake-check it.
Verification
To verify the video, CrossRiverWatch ran it through InVID, a video verification tool which helps verify videos by breaking them into keyframes. Invid provided three key frames from the video on Facebook, and a reverse image search showed no similar images.
CrossRiverWatch went back to the post on Facebook in search of clues about where the video was from. In a search through the video comment, some mentioned that the environment looks like a scene in the movie “Brotherhood” they had seen.
A keyword search of “movie brotherhood,” led to several results, including the movie’s trailer on YouTube, with the yellow bus on the Facebook video appearing on it.
Brotherhood is an action movie about two brothers who took different paths after the death of their father- one becoming a police officer and the other an armed robber.
With a talented cast consisting of Falz, Tobi Bakre, Basket Mouth, Macaroni and others, the movie was released in 2022.
CrossRiverWatch carried out a scene-by-scene analysis of the movie Brotherhood on Video-on-demand provider, Amazon Prime, and discovered that the video on Facebook is a phone recording of the filming of a scene in the movie where the cops (the four policemen and the man in grey suit) were after a gang of robbers (the men in the yellow mini-bus) who had just robbed a bank. The scene is about 45 minutes into the movie.
Conclusion
The video is from the set of the movie, “Brotherhood” and not from real life as the post on Facebook suggests.
The researcher produced this fact-check per the DUBAWA 2023 Kwame KariKari Fellowship partnership with CrossRiverWatch to facilitate the ethos of “truth” in journalism and enhance media literacy in the country.