A video going viral on social media (here, here, and here) claims that Income Tax Department officials have seized a substantial quantity of gold ornaments from Mubina Nishka Begum, who served as the Public Relations Officer (PRO) for Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) during the YSRCP Government in Andhra Pradesh. Let’s verify the claim made in the post through this article.
Claim: The video shows Income Tax Department officials seizure of a substantial quantity of gold ornaments from Mubina Nishka Begum, who served as the Public Relations Officer (PRO) for Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) during the YSRCP Government in Andhra Pradesh.
Fact: The viral video is unrelated to Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam. It shows a media conference held by Vellore Police after the recovery of stolen gold from the Jos Alukkas showroom in December 2021. Additionally, TTD issued a clarification on their official X handle on 05 January 2025, stating that the gold jewelry featured in the video is unrelated to their Public Relations Officer and that no Muslim individual held the position of PRO at TTD. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
We conducted an internet search using relevant keywords to verify the viral claim. However, we found no credible reports confirming the seizure of gold ornaments from anyone names Mubina Nishka Begum, who served as the PRO for TTD. Given the incident’s significance, it would have attracted substantial media coverage, but no such reports were found.
In the debunking process, we found an X-post (archived) from TTD’s official handle on 05 January 2025, stating that the gold ornaments in the video are not connected to the TTD PRO, as claimed in the viral post. The post also clarified that no Muslim individual has served as a public relations officer at Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam.
To gather more information about the viral video, we conducted a reverse image search of the keyframes from the viral video, which that led us to a video (archived) on the Jaya Plus YouTube channel, from the Tamil media house ‘Jaya,’ dated 22 December 2021. The video featured the same visuals. According to its description, the footage is from a media conference held by the Vellore Police after the recovery of looted gold from the Jos Alukkas showroom in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, in December 2021. We also found that several other news channels had uploaded videos showing the same footage with similar descriptions on their YouTube channels (here and here).
We used relevant Tamil keywords and found several Tamil news reports published in December 2021 (here, here, and, here). According to these reports, on the night of 14 December 2021, some miscreants looted 15 kg of gold and around 500 grams of diamonds from the Jos Alukkas showroom in Vellore. Following an investigation, the police recovered all the stolen jewellery from a crematorium in Vellore. The main accused in the incident, Deekaraman was arrested by the police.
Factly had previously debunked the same video when it went viral, claiming that the Income Tax Department raided a Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD) board member and seized jewellery.
To sum up, the video of a Tamil Nadu Police press conference from December 2021 about stolen gold is falsely shared as IT Department officials seizing gold from TTD ex-PRO Mubina Nishka Begum.
