00:00Old Paris riot footage resurfaces under fake claims
00:08A video has gained significant traction online purportedly showing the streets of Paris in
00:14turmoil following a recent riot.
00:16Posts such as this one on X say that the clip shows scenes from the French capital in recent
00:21days and question why there appears to be no reporting on it in the media.
00:25This post, meanwhile, compares the scenes to missile strikes in the Middle East
00:29as the Iran war continues,
00:31before pushing the blame onto French President Emmanuel Macron.
00:34They've been seen hundreds of thousands of times
00:37and liked and re-shared thousands of times.
00:39But the posts are misleading because they've been taken out of context.
00:43While they do indeed show the streets of Paris following a riot,
00:47they're not recent and actually date back to December 2022.
00:50A reverse image search of a still from the video
00:53takes us to multiple news reports from the time,
00:55explaining that the footage depicts protests in Paris
00:58in the aftermath of a deadly shooting that targeted the Kurdish community.
01:02Three people were killed and others were wounded
01:04in an attack that the French authorities say was a racially motivated hate crime.
01:09William Mallet confessed to the killings,
01:11saying that he had a pathological hatred of foreigners
01:14and remained in custody while the case moves through the French legal system.
01:18The protests that followed the shooting boiled over
01:21after the French government dismissed terrorism
01:23as a possible motive for the killings,
01:25with some accusing the Turkish state of being involved.
01:28Turkey denies this.
01:30Protesters overturned cars, started fires and clashed with riot police,
01:35leading to several arrests and injuries on both sides.
01:38French Response, the anti-disinformation arm of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
01:43has also confirmed that the video is from 2022 rather than 2026,
01:47and denounced its current circulation on social media
01:50as framing rather than evidence.
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