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Multiple Facebook posts have shared a video which shows police detaining a man dressed in a burqa, who the posts claim is one of the perpetrators of the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka. The claim is false; the video has circulated online since at least August 2018 -- more than nine months before the deadly suicide bombings happened on April 21, 2019 in Sri Lanka. The posts, for example, this one first published on April 23, 2019 and shared around 600 times since, contain a video showing police forcing a man wearing a black burqa to remove the garment. The post’s caption says: A Buddhist dressed as a Muslim woman was caught by the Sri Lankan Police. He os one of the rouges who bombed the Sri Lankan Church. Below is the screenshot of the misleading post: Screenshot of the misleading post The same video was shared here on Twitter with the same caption, while the footage was also shared alongside similar claims here on Facebook. The posts were uploaded two days after the attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday left 258 people dead. Here is an AFP report on the Sri Lanka attacks. A website url is written on the misleading video which reads: www.nethnews.lk . A keyword search of the nethnews website found the exact same footage and an original article were posted here on August 30, 2018. The Sinhalese-language story is headlined: A man dressed in a burqa has come for revenge. The story describes how police arrested a man who had disguised himself with a burqa while he sought to attack someone over a debt issue. The incident happened in the suburbs of Colombo in a market complex in Welikada, the report says. Neth News also published the original video on August 29, 2018 on their YouTube channel. UPDATE: This fact check was updated on May 16, 2017 with a revised death toll from the bombings.
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