An old video of an Indian mayor and his companions falling into a creek when their boat overturned resurfaced in social media posts in May 2024 that falsely claimed to show it Murtaza Wahab Siddiqui, the mayor of Karachi, Pakistan. The clip is from 2016 and shows Surendra Furtado, then mayor of the western Indian city of Panaji, with local journalists and officials who were killed when their weed cleaning boat capsized.
“Scenes from the sinking of Titanic observed during a patrol of Gujjar Nala by Murtaza Wahab and KMC (Karachi Metropolitan Corporation) officials,” said an Urdu-language Facebook post sharing the video on May 2.
The Gujjar Nala is a natural drain in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, which has Murtaza Wahab Siddiqui as its mayor and is the capital of the southern province of Sindh.
The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which governs the province, has overseen a project since 2007 to clean up the waterway clogged by garbage and riddled with encroachments (archived link).
The operation has long been a controversial topic among residents following the demolition of houses.
The Facebook post jokingly referred to the sinking ship seen in the video as “the Bhutto Titanic,” referring to Pakistani ex-leader and PPP founder Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
Karachi, a coastal metropolis of more than 20 million people, is crumbling under the weight of dilapidated infrastructure, fueling discontent and lack of trust in the federal and provincial governments.
The monsoon season is felt most heavily in the city, where clogged drains and culverts cause widespread flooding.
The video was shared in similar posts on Facebook, social media platform X and YouTube who falsely claimed that the Mayor of Karachi fell into the Gujjar Nala.
Some social media users seemed to believe this false claim.
“This is divine justice. He who stole Karachi’s mandate and was installed as mayor has had a first-hand taste and rejection of Karachi’s sewage,” said one person.
“That’s where they belong,” wrote another.
However, the images do show the mayor of the Indian city of Panaji.
Photo-op went wrong
A reverse image search of keyframes on Google found a 2016 Reddit post titled: “Panaji Mayor Surendra Furtado falls into sewage after boat capsizes – [P]R stunt goes wrong” (archived link).
Keyword searches found a video of the incident posted on India Today’s YouTube channel on June 27, 2016 (archived link).
The video is titled: “Photo-Op of Panaji Mayor Ends Up in Sewage Caught On Camera” (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of video shared on social media (left) and posted on YouTube by India Today (right).
The footage shows Panaji’s then mayor Surendra Furtado capsizing on a weeding machine he was unveiling to local media at St Inez Creek.
Local media extensively reported the accident, which was called a “great shame” for the mayor (archived link).
Furtado confirmed to AFP for a similar fact check that he was the man in the video.
“I had gone for an inspection of a newly introduced weeding machine,” he told AFP in 2018.
“The ship lost its balance and we tumbled. No one was injured.”
Wahab Siddiqui clarified in an X-post on April 30 that he was not in the video (archived link).
