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Man seen removing drain cover in viral CCTV footage from Mumbai is not a Muslim

A 36-second video, which appears to be CCTV footage, is going viral, which shows a man stepping out of an auto-rickshaw and forcefully wrenching open an iron grating or a…

The post Man seen removing drain cover in viral CCTV footage from Mumbai is not a Muslim appeared first on Alt News.

A 36-second video, which appears to be CCTV footage, is going viral, which shows a man stepping out of an auto-rickshaw and forcefully wrenching open an iron grating or a manhole cover from the roadside. It is claimed that the man destroying public infrastructure is an illegal Bangladeshi named Sheik Nazarul.

X user Baba Banaras (@RealBababanaras) shared the video claiming that Sheik Nazarul had been arrested. (Archive)

The post has garnered over 60,000 views.

Another X account, The Frontal Force (@FrontalForce), shared the video with similar claims on September 23, 2025. (Archive)

The post has accumulated over 4,00,000 views.

Another account named Eminent Intellectual (@totalwoke2) shared the video with the caption: “The 0.5 front”. ‘0.5 Front’ is a cryptic reference to former Army chief General Bipin Rawat’s 2017 remark that the Indian Army was prepared for two and a half-front war. By 2.5 front, he meant wars with Pakistan and China and internal security threats. The Right Wing often uses this ‘0.5 front’ terminology to refer to Muslims.    

Several other social media users have also shared the footage with similar claims.

Click to view slideshow.

 

It is important to note that both Baba Banaras and The Frontal Force have been found by Alt News disseminating misinformation and communal propaganda several times in the past. 

Fact Check

To verify the authenticity of the claim, we first tried to locate the place of occurrence. A keyword search led us to an X post made by media outlet Local Tak on August 29, 2025, which shows the same video. And in the caption, the location was mentioned as Aaram Nagar in Andheri West, Mumbai. 

Taking a cue from this, we looked for the FIR copy and found that a complaint in this regard had been registered at Versova police station, which had jurisdiction over the Aram Nagar area. The complaint was filed on August 28, 2025, by Vicky Shyamlal Sharma, a junior engineer with the roads department of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

According to the FIR, on August 28, Sharma reported to work at 10:30 am, and around 12:30 pm, while inspecting the roads near the Barista Hotel in J P Road, Andheri West, Mumbai, along with his colleagues, they noticed that five iron gratings of 2ft x 1.5ft dimension belonging to municipal corporation were missing from the roadside drains. They searched the area, which yielded nothing, confirming that the iron gratings had been stolen. Sharma mentioned that the total cost of the five iron gratings was approximately Rs 65,000. 

Following this, we contacted Versova Police. Inspector Deepshikha Vare confirmed to Alt News that the man seen in the CCTV footage had been arrested on August 29, 2025, and was in judicial custody. His name was Amarjit Bikhari Kamati.

The officer shared further details of the case with us. The accused, Kamati, 30, was a resident of Goregaon West, Mumbai. He was booked under BNS 303 (2) (theft). Police had recovered all the five iron gratings from him. Remand papers shared by Versova Police with Alt News confirm that neither is the accused’s name Sheik Nazarul, nor is he a Bangladeshi.   

To sum up, the man seen in the video removing a drain cover on the roadside was falsely identified as Sheik Nazarul. In the incident reported Aram Nagar in Mumbai’s Versova police station area, the accused has been identified as Amarjit Bikhari Kamati, a resident of Goregaon West, Mumbai. He has been arrested. The claims made by the social media account are false.

The post Man seen removing drain cover in viral CCTV footage from Mumbai is not a Muslim appeared first on Alt News.


This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Ankita Mahalanobish.


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