A man from Pakistan’s third-largest city Rawalpindi has told AFP he was mistaken for a right chairman of the former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan‘s illegal marriage case in messages where he threw money at a dancer. The posts – viewed hundreds of thousands of times – circulated as Khan and his third wife appealed their conviction from prison.
The video also shows Chaudhry Asad, a resident of Rawalpindi when he performs as “Papu Patwari”, where he throws money at a woman dressed in white as she dances in a large hall.
“This is the honorable judge to rule on the iddat case,” read a caption in Urdu next to the video shared on X on May 29.
The post, which has been viewed more than 394,000 times, referred to a judge who presided over Khan’s “illegal marriage” case. Similar posts were shared on TikTok and X.
Khan was given a seven-year prison sentence for breaking Islamic law by marrying his third wife Bushra Bibi too soon after her divorce.
The conviction was based on an Islamic law known as “iddat”, which requires a widow or divorced woman to wait three months before remarrying. Khan and his wife have appealed the verdict from prison.
Local fact checking organizations Geo Fact Check and iVerify debunked the claim in the false messages and identified the man as Asad through a series of online searches (archived links here and here).
AFP contacted Asad by phone, who said the images in the fake messages showed him performing at an event.
“Yes, the video is mine. It’s a pretty old video,” he said.
Keyword searches and reverse images of the video’s keyframes on Google also found the same footage shared on TikTok on May 2 by a fan account using a version of Asad’s stage name (archived link).
The screenshot comparison below shows the video in the fake posts (left) and the footage shared by Asad’s fan account (right):
Similar footage from the same event was previously shared by YouTube channel Gill InfoTech on April 27 (archived link). It shows the same man with the dancer, but with a wide camera angle.
AFP’s court reporter Saqib Bashir also confirmed that the man in the dance video was not Judge Shahrukh Arjumand, who was presiding over Khan’s case when the messages were published.
A LinkedIn post shared by Adil Aziz Qazi, the vice chairman of the Islamabad Bar Council (IBC), featured a photo of Justice Arjumand (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the man in the false posts (left) and the image of right Arjumand, circled in red (right):
