Video shows recovered jewellery from 2021 burglary case, not from ‘Muslim employee of Hindu temple’

A video of police displaying jewellery from a robbery in 2021 has been shared repeatedly with a false claim the haul had been “recovered” during a raid on the home of a Muslim working as a public relations officer at a prominent Hindu temple in India. A police spokesman told AFP they did not conduct the raid, while the temple’s management rejected the claim and said it has never hired any Muslims for the position.

The 37-second video of a table covered in jewellery was shared on Facebook on January 6, 2025.

“The Income Tax Department has recovered this huge amount of gold jewellery during a raid at the house of a jihadi Muslim woman Mubina Nishka Begum, a public relation officer appointed by the Jagan Mohan government at Tirupati Devasthanam,” read the Hindi-language caption.

Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) is an independent trust which manages various Hindu temples in southern India (archived link).

Jagan Mohan Reddy is the former chief minister of the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh and leads the centre-left opposition Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party.

He has previously promised welfare schemes for Muslims during his rallies and pledged to keep the four percent quota of government jobs reserved for the minority religious group (archived link).

Calls for India to more closely align the country’s officially secular political system with its majority Hindu faith have rapidly grown louder since Modi was swept to office in 2014 (archived link).

It has made the country’s roughly 210-million-strong Muslim minority increasingly anxious about their future.

The video was shared with similar claims elsewhere on Facebook and X.

But it was in fact shot in 2021 and shows jewellery recovered from a robbery.

Old video

TTD labelled the claim “fake news” in an Instagram post on January 5 that stated “no such Muslim person” was employed as a public relations officer (archived link).

A reverse image search on Google found a similar video of the recovered jewellery shared on X on December 20, 2021 by a local journalist (archived link).

The post stated police in Vellore, a city in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, had arrested a burglar who made off with the jewellery after he drilled a hole through the wall of a jewellery store.

Below is a screenshot comparison of the circulating video (left) and the X video (right), with similarities highlighted by AFP:

Further keyword searches on Google found similar images of the police displaying the recovered loot published by local media outlets in December 2021 (archived links here and here).

The reports said police in Vellore had recovered 16 kilogrammes of gold and diamonds from a burial ground in Odukathur, and that the suspect — identified as V Teekaraman — had entered the jewellery showroom by making a hole in its back wall.

Vellore police spokesman Murugan Siddharth told AFP on January 13 that there were no raids of any temple employee homes.

“The video is old and shows a recovery of jewellery from a robbery in 2021, the claim is false that police recovered it from temple priests’ or any employees’ premise,” Siddharth told AFP.

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