The City Crime Branch (CCB) police on Sunday arrested a resident of Tilaknagar for allegedly posting a video of an overcrowded hospital outpatient department online and falsely claiming that it was Victoria Hospital. The video clip, which was doing the rounds on social media on July 18, showed hundreds of patients in the OPD not wearing masks or observing social distancing norms waiting for their turn while a man claiming to be a doctor was begging for help.
“This is the amount of rush that we are getting at room number 5, OPD ground floor. Looking at the amount of patients here, it is a complete threat to all the doctors and staff of the hospital including the patients,” said the man who identified himself as a doctor.
The arrested has been identified as Sameer Ullah (46), a resident of Tilaknagar. In his post, he said the video was from Victoria Hospital, creating panic among citizens as Bengaluru, which is currently seeing a surge in people contracting the virus, said the police. As the video went viral, Victoria Hospital authorities dismissed it and said that the incident happened in a hospital in North India and not in Bengaluru.
The city police filed a case under provisions of the IT Act, National Disaster Management Act, and sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
Sandeep Patil, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime), told The Hindu, “The said video is of some other State. Some people posted the video on social media and attributed it to Victoria Hospital and caused a lot of panic among the general public. We got our CCB technical team to investigate and found out that the accused himself posted it on Facebook and said it is from Victoria Hospital. He has been taken into custody and all his phones are being checked. Further investigation is on to trace others who have posted false posts.”
Police Commissioner Bhaskar Rao too shared the photo of the accused on social media. He said that the CCB swiftly identified and arrested the person circulating fake videos.
