In the wake of the demise of the Kannada film star Puneeth Raj Kumar due to a cardiac arrest, a social media post accompanying a video which appears to be a CCTV recording of a man collapsing on a staircase after experiencing a cardiac arrest is being shared widely. The post claims that the video shows Kannada actor Puneeth Raj Kumar collapsing due to cardiac arrest. Let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video of Puneeth Raj Kumar collapsing due to cardiac arrest.
Fact: The man in the viral video is not Puneeth Rajkumar. It is related to an incident which happened in August 2021 in Bengaluru. Multiple news agencies reported the same video back then. The same viral video was also attributed to actor Sidharth Shukla when he died of cardiac arrest. As of now, no official video has been released related to Puneeth Rajkumar’s demise. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
The man in the viral video is not Puneeth Rajkumar and it is a two-month-old video. Google search with relevant keywords yielded two months old Kannada news reports which reported the same viral video. These reports carried a better version of the viral video, which clearly carried the CCTV recording date as 25/08/2021. This proves that the video is of an incident that took place in August this year, much before the demise of the Kannada actor.
Another news video reported that the video is from Gold’s Gym at Banashankari, Bengaluru.
When the same video was also attributed to actor Sidharth Shukla, who also died of cardiac arrest a couple of months earlier, BOOM, a fact-checking agency reached out to Gold’s Gym, Banashankari. The center manager told BOOM that ‘the man had come for a trial class at our gym. After the workout, he fainted at the stairway. We quickly called an ambulance and took him to the ambulance and by the same time, his family and friends had reached. We do not know what happened after that.”
Further, no video related to Puneeth Rajkumar’s demise has been released officially as of now. Hence, all these establish that the viral video is not related to Puneeth Rajkumar’s death.
To sum it up, an old video of a man collapsing due to cardiac arrest is passed off attributing it to Puneeth Rajkumar.
