Man in viral massage video is not Jamaat lawmaker Shahjahan Chowdhury
A video showing a man receiving a facial massage has been spread on social media recently with the claim that the man in the video is Shahjahan Chowdhury, a member of Parliament from Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami. However, a fact-check by Dismislab found the claim to be false. The man receiving the massage is a person named Jaspal Singh Sarai.
The video was recently posted on Facebook from a page named “Channel 14”. The post read, “Jamaat MP Shahjahan Chowdhury’s video at Gulshan Spa Center goes viral.” The same text also appeared in the caption embedded within the video. As of the time this report was published, the post had received more than 2,000 reactions and had been shared more than 700 times.
The video was also posted from several other accounts (1, 2, 3).
A post making the same claim was also found on Instagram.
To verify the claim, several keyframes from the video were used to conduct a reverse image search. This led to the same video posted on an Instagram account named “pardeep.kaur.dhillon” on April 12 in a post. The post included hashtags related to massage, spa and self-care.
A different video, posted on March 28 from the same Instagram account, was also found in a post. That video likewise showed the same man receiving a facial massage. A further review of the account uncovered a post from March 16 in which Pardeep Kaur referred to the man in the video as her husband.
Pardeep Kaur’s Facebook profile was then located. In a post dated April 14, she tagged her husband’s profile. From this, it was learned that her husband’s name is Jaspal Singh Sarai. According to information available on the account, the couple are residents of India who currently live in New Jersey, in the United States.
In other words, the man in the video circulating with the claim that Bangladesh Jamaat leader Shahjahan Chowdhury was receiving a massage in Gulshan is a person named Jaspal Singh Sarai.
The same video had previously been spread on social media in April with the claim that it showed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. At that time, multiple fact-checking organizations published fact-check reports on the video (1, 2, 3).
All social media captions, quotations, and news excerpts in this article have been translated into English from the languages in which they were originally posted or published.
