Claim: A video shows police officers mistreating and beating three women in Balochistan.
Fact: While the video does show police officers mistreating three women, the incident occurred in the Swat District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2021.
On 13 March 2025, a video on Facebook claimed to show police officers in Balochistan mistreating three women. The caption of the post stated the following in Urdu:
“بلوچستان میں ایسا بھی ہوتا ہے”
This reads as follows in English:
“This also happens in Balochistan”
The account that posted this video regularly shares content regarding the injustices faced by the Baloch community in the country. This includes videos of people voicing support for human rights activist Dr Mahrang Baloch and recent posts demanding her release from prison.
On 21 March 2025, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), led by Dr Baloch, staged a “sit-in on the Sariab Road, near University of Balochistan”. This sit-in was held in response to the arrest of several BYC members, including senior member Beebarg Baloch. To dispel protestors, police used water cannons, tear gas, and fired blank shots. According to Dr Mahrang Baloch, three protestors lost their lives and 13 others were injured. 10 police personnel were also reportedly injured, according to a spokesperson of the Balochistan government.
Later at night, at 11:30 pm, Dr Baloch announced a province-wide shutter-down strike against the police violence that occurred during the day. She was then arrested on 22 March 2025, along with 16 other activists, in a pre-dawn raid by security forces.
Fact or Fiction?
A reverse-image search of keyframes of the video in the claim was conducted to locate its origins. The results pointed to the video being from before 2025. This can be seen in Facebook posts here and here. The first post is from 10 August 2021 and the second is dated 12 August 2021. Both posts have captions in Dari that claim the video shows Afghan women being mistreated by Pakistani police. The second post’s caption hints at the police officers being Punjabi.
Soch Fact Check also found the video in an article by Daily Pakistan dated 4 February 2021. The article stated that the video showed police officers beating up three women in the Swat District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. According to the article, the women had been arrested “in a robbery case”. The police had allegedly recovered “19 tolas stolen gold and the cash amount of Rs1 lac” from them.
To see if this was true, a Google search was conducted for the title of the article “Five KP cops suspended, booked for beating up women in Swat”. This yielded a number of articles about the incident from other news outlets like The Express Tribune, Dawn, Naya Daur Media, and The News. These articles, published on either 3 February or 4 February 2021, also stated that the incident occurred in Swat District and the women were arrested on charges of theft.
The articles also mentioned that the five officers involved were suspended. The article in The Express Tribune also shared a picture of the official order to suspend the officers, citing the date of the incident in the video as 31 January 2021.
However, unlike the captions of the Facebook posts, none of the articles mentioned that the women were Afghan, but we cannot verify the ethnicity or nationality of the people in the video.
Soch Fact Check is able to conclude that the video in the claim does not show police officers manhandling women in Balochistan. The video is actually from Swat District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and it shows an incident which took place in January 2021. .
Virality
On Facebook, the video in the claim amassed 1.4 million views. It was also found here and here.
Conclusion: The claim is misleading as the video is not from Balochistan. The video in fact shows police officers beating three women in Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in January 2021 who were arrested over accusations of theft.
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Background image in cover photo: The Express Tribune