Years-old footage of coffin case in South Africa falsely shared as visuals of Sudan crisis

After Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces captured the army’s stronghold in the western town of El-Fasher in late October 2025, social media posts shared an old video falsely claiming it showed Islamic extremists burying a Christian alive. The video first appeared in 2016 news reports about white farmers who forced a black man into a coffin in South Africa.

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“Innocent Christians are being buried alive by Islamist terrorists in Sudan,” reads a Facebook post shared on November 3, 2025.

The clip included with the post shows a man crouching in a coffin, groaning as another man pushes the lid down over his head.

Screenshot of the fake post captured on November 6, 2025, with a red X added by AFP

The video was released online as the Sudanese army and a paramilitary group engage in a power struggle that has lasted for more than two years now.

Fighting has raged since April 2023, pitting the forces of army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against those of his former deputy, RSF commander Mohammed Hamdan Daglo (archived link).

The RSF captured El-Fasher, the army’s last major stronghold in West Darfur, on October 26. The takeover was accompanied by reports of massacres, sexual violence and looting, sparking international condemnation.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions to flee their homes, as recent clashes have spread to new regions, raising fears of an escalation of the humanitarian disaster (archived link).

Islamophobic comments on the clip, shared in similar posts on Facebook and X, suggest users believed the claim to be genuine.

“We need to deal with this very quickly; Islam is a threat to the world,” wrote one user.

Another commented: “Cruel and invasive foreign religions should be examined and banned. »

But the video is old and predates the current crisis in Sudan.

Unrelated incident

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the clip found the same video uploaded to China Global Television Network’s YouTube channel on November 18, 2016 (archived link).

The video is titled “White South African men force black man into coffin.”

The clip was shared on the media outlet’s verified Facebook page with the same caption (archived link).

The footage was also included in a report published by media organization Al Jazeera, which said two white men in South Africa were charged with assault after footage surfaced showing them forcing a black man into a coffin and threatening to set him on fire (archived link).

Willem Oosthuizen and Theo Martins Jackson have pleaded not guilty to the incident in the eastern province of Mpumalanga, saying they only intended to frighten Victor Mlotshwa after he allegedly stole copper cables from their farm.

But a South African judge found the two white farmers guilty of attempted murder, AFP reported on August 25, 2017 (archived link).

The two men were sentenced to 16 and 19 years in prison in October of the same year, but the Supreme Court of Appeal reduced their prison terms in 2019 (archived link).

South Africa is plagued by deep-rooted racial inequality, even after the end of white minority rule in 1994, and racist incidents regularly erupt on social media.

The AFP has debunked the disinformation spreading in India and stemming from political crises elsewhere in the world, here and here.