Video shows Pakistani police breaking Karachi protests without defeating Jamia Hafsa’s students
After students at Jamia Hafsa seminary in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad staged a demonstration to demand the release of their arrested principal, they watched hundreds of thousands of old videos in a post that falsely claimed the police had run female protesters. In fact, the video posted and reports about the police’s “brutal” police officers in November 2022 during protests on the demolition of houses in Sindh Province.
“This is unfair to the students of Jamia Hafsa of Lal Masjid,” the Urdu language title wrote in a Facebook video shared on February 27, 2025.
The video shows more than 146,000 times showing police pushing a woman wearing a headscarf into a police car.
Screenshot of fake posts, taken on March 7, 2025
Similar videos have been shared hundreds of times elsewhere Facebook.
The posts surfaced, with female students from Jamia Hafsa Theological Seminary, linked to the Lal Mosque (Red Mosque) in Islamabad, staged a protest in the Pakistani capital that blocked traffic after its main Ume Hassan after being arrested on February 19 (archive link).
Hassan, wife of Abdul Aziz, the radical pastor of Hassanarrested for armed attacks on police and government staff.
With the tensions following Hassan’s arrest, more than 150 police officers blocked the roads around the Red Mosque, a scene of a bloody surrounding area in July 2007, killing more than 100 people as the military sought to appease the mosque and arrest its leaders (here and here).
However, videos circulating online did not show police assaulting and arresting Jamia Hafsa’s students.
Jihad colonial protest
The police in the false shared footage wears a vest marked “Sindh Police” and their uniforms correspond to the vest seen in AFP photos taken in November 2022.
The combination of keywords and reverse image searches led to the same footage released by Pakistani politicians Mohsin Dawar and Qasim Khan Suri, as well as a report from Local Outlet Soch November 2022 (Here, archive here here).
Dawar’s X Post reads that Karachi police attacked women who demolished houses in jihad colonies in Karachi, which is shameful. ”
The community in Karachi is more than 1,130 km (700 miles) from Islamabad.
Screenshots compare wrong shared videos (left) and videos posted by politicians in November 2022 (right)
The demolition of the house is part of the anti-rescue momentum led by the Karachi Development Authority, Claimed structure It is illegally occupied by the state (archived here and here).
Local media reported at the time that more than 400 families had been demolished and residents said they had been brutalized by police (archive link).
“Pakistan authorities often use colonial laws and policies to forcibly expel low-income residents, shop owners and street vendors to achieve public and private development projects,” a report from the Archived Link in May 2024.
It urged the authorities to reform their land laws and ensure that no one is homeless due to eviction and that there are sufficient compensation and placement options.
