A 54-second video of journalist Palki Sharma is being widely shared on social media with the claim that she is reporting about an Indian man being detained in Bahrain for allegedly working in Israel's favour. The clip is circulating amid the ongoing co… Read on blog or Reader Alt News Read on blog or Reader Deepfake alert: Video of Palki Sharma 'reporting' on IRIS Dena & Indian's arrest in Bahrain is fabricated By Oishani Bhattacharya on 13th March 2026 A 54-second video of journalist Palki Sharma is being widely shared on social media with the claim that she is reporting about an Indian man being detained in Bahrain for allegedly working in Israel's favour. The clip is circulating amid the ongoing conflict involving the United States, Israel and Iran. In the video, Sharma says that incidents like these erode the trust Gulf countries place in India and make it harder for Indians to work in the region. She also claims that India tracked the Iranian naval vessel IRIS Dena and shared intelligence with Israel, after which the ship was allegedly torpedoed by a United States submarine. Journalist Kavish Aziz (@azizkavish) posted the above-mentioned video on March 13. The post was later deleted, but not before it had garnered over 50,000 views. (Archive) Several other users posted the viral clip while claiming that Sharma had reported on an Indian man's detention in Bahrain and how India's stance in the ongoing US-Israel-Iran war could affect Indians who traveled to these gulf countries for work. This slideshow requires JavaScript. The video is also viral on other platforms, including on Threads. Fact Check Two points made by Sharma in the said 'bulletin' -- the 'news' of an Indian national's arrest in Bahrain and India's role in the US-Israel ally locating and destroying IRIS Dena -- are baseless and false. Alt News had on March 10 fact-checked the viral claim that an Indian national had been held in Bahrain on charges of espionage for Mossad. We found a press release by Bahrain's interior ministry, where it was mentioned that six Asians -- five from Pakistan and one from Bangladesh had been detained in Bahrain for "filming, publishing, and republishing video clips" related to the impacts of Iranian aggression. On the same day, Bahrain's general directorate of anti-corruption, economic and electronic security shared a post on Instagram stating that the news of an Indian's arrest was false. The Indian government, too, refuted it in an X post. READ: No, Bahrain has not arrested an Indian national for espionage Further, on March 9 Alt News fact-checked a viral video featuring Indian Chief of Army Staff Upendra Dwivedi, who had apparently said that India had shared Iris Dena's location coordinates with Israel since the two countries are allies. Alt News found that the video was a deepfake and Dwivedi never made such a statement. A number of foreign media outlets had run stories based on the deepfake video. READ: Viral clip of Army Chief Upendra Dwivedi 'admitting' India gave away Iranian ship's location is a deepfake This raised doubts about the authenticity of the viral video. To verify its source, we ran a reverse image search on some of the keyframes of the clip and found the video posted on Firstpost's YouTube channel on March 10. The title of the video was, "Iran's New Supreme Leader: Who Is Mojtaba Khamenei? | Vantage with Palki Sharma | N18G". Palki Sharma's clothes and the background matched that of the viral clip. In the segment where the background matches that of the viral clip (from 4:17 to 24:02), Palki Sharma does not say any of the statements heard in the circulating video. This suggests that the visuals were taken from this portion of the Firstpost broadcast and later overlaid with artificially generated audio. Besides, the voice in the viral clip carries a noticeably different accent from Sharma's original speech. Therefore, it is clear that the viral video of Palki Sharma is not a clip from an actual news broadcast. It is a deepfake. The audio is generated artificially.

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