A video of a leopard that strayed into a pharmaceutical company in Telangana is falsely being attributed to Ghaziabad - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
June 22, 2023
A video that shows a leopard inside a building is being shared on social media with a claim that this was filmed inside a company in Ghaziabad’s Lal Kuan. Let’s verify this claim through this article.
Claim: Video of a leopard that walked into a company in Ghaziabad.
Fact: This incident actually took place in Sanga Reddy District, Telangana. A leopard entered a manufacturing unit of Hetero Drugs Ltd in December 2022. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To gather more details about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search using keyframes from the video. This search led us to news reports containing screenshots of the viral video. According to reports, on 16 December 2022, a leopard entered a manufacturing unit of Hetero Drugs Ltd located in the Gadda Potharam Industrial Area in Sangareddy district, Telangana.
Reporting on this incident, Telangana Today wrote, “The leopard remained inside the plant the entire night. The security staff, who noticed it inside the industry, informed the forest and police officials. Forest officials have requested authorities at the Nehru Zoological Park to send an expert team to rescue the leopard, which was still inside the pharma unit when reports last came in.“
Several other media outlets, such as The News Minute, Scroll, and Deccan Chronicle, also reported on this incident. Additionally, we searched the internet to see if any leopard sightings were reported in Ghaziabad. We found that the same video was shared on social media with a message claiming that a leopard entered an industrial area in Lal Kuan, Ghaziabad (same claim as this).
After the video went viral, a team from the forest department investigated the premises but found no footprints or signs of a leopard. Later, the forest department team discovered that the video was old. Amar Ujala reported that Deputy Ranger Sanjay Singh appealed to people not to rely on such information and “also to refrain from making such videos viral without verifying their veracity.”
To sum up, the video of a leopard that strayed into a pharmaceutical company in Telangana is falsely attributed to Ghaziabad.