As Sadiq Khan (here and here) won as the Mayor of London in the recently conducted elections, a video (here, here, and here ) claiming to be his victory procession is being shared on social media. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Visuals of Muslims celebrating the victory of London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
Fact: This is an old video from 2021 that shows the visuals of an Ashura Procession that was held in London. This has nothing to do with Sadiq Khan or the London Mayor elections. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
We performed a reverse image search on a few keyframes of the viral video to check the viral claim’s veracity. This search led us to a Facebook post(archive link) from September 2021 that contained the same video. It was described as visuals of ‘Ashura Procession 2021 London’
We then searched for more videos of this procession from 2021 and were led to social media posts(here and here) from 2021 that contained similar visuals of the ‘Ashura procession 2021.’ Ashura is an Islamic Holy Day observed on the 10th day of Muharram, the first month of the Muslim calendar.
You can see the similarities in the viral video and the videos from this procession in the following collage. They are holding similar placards with the same logos, and the Oxford Street banners can also be seen in the procession videos.
This makes it clear that an old video is being shared as a video of Muslims celebrating the victory of Sadiq Khan in the London Mayoral elections. The same video had also gone viral in 2023, linking it to the Hamas-Israel conflict. Fact-check organisations like Misbar (here) and Boomlive debunked the false claim back then.
To sum up, a video from 2021 is falsely being shared as visuals of Muslims celebrating the victory of Sadiq Khan in the recently held London mayoral elections.
