Vandalism in Brussels: Was a cry of 'Allahu Akbar' edited into this video?

On New Year's Eve, a group of young hooligans were caught on camera as they pushed a car down the stairs of a metro stop in Brussels. The video has already been viewed more than two million times. But there’s a second version of this same video that has also been circulating online. In it, you can hear the young people shout out “Allahu Akbar!” After some digging, the Observers Team realised that it is very likely that someone had doctored the video.

The video was shot around 8pm on New Year’s Eve. A group of jubilant youngsters pushed a green electric car down the stairs of the Clémenceau metro stop in the Anderlecht district. The car hurtled down the stairs before coming to a stop on the platform without injuring anyone. A few hours later, this same group of young people burned a large Christmas tree in the same neighbourhood.

While the local mayor declared that he would “not tolerate” such behaviour, he warned people that these acts were mere vandalism and should not be linked to terrorism. Terrorism has been on everyone’s minds in Brussels because nearby Molenbeek, another district in the Brussels-Capital region, is considered an at-risk area and has been under police surveillance since the Paris attacks.

The mayor’s fears that these acts of vandalism would be linked to terrorism were not unfounded. Very shortly after the original video was published, a second video of the same scene was posted online. Unlike in the first video, in the first few seconds of the second video, you can hear a man saying “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest” in Arabic), a common phrase used by Muslims but which many people now systematically link to jihadist attacks.

One of our readers alerted us to this video, which was posted on the video platform Liveleak. He said that the Arabic phrase in Arabic had been added to the original. Belgian Internet user C. Uytterelst, who was one of the first people to share the original video, also said that she was “shocked” to see that the sound had been “tampered with” in the second video. "They never, never, never shouted that in the original video,” she said.

The display format is slightly different in the two videos but, aside from the sound, the footage is the same. The Observers Team decided to show these two videos to sound engineers. They noticed several details that support the theory that the phrase “Allahu Akbar” had been added.

Firstly, the engineers pointed out that the sound in the first video is much better quality than the second video, which seems to indicate that the video with the Arabic phrase was edited. Secondly, the phrase “Allahu Akbar” doesn’t seem to have been recorded in the same place as the other audio in the video.

“In the rest of the video, you can hear echoes of the noises the car is making and the yells of the troublemakers. The ‘Allahu Akbar’, however, seems to have been recorded elsewhere and to have been added to the video", said one of the experts we interviewed.

“Finally, it is much easier to add a phrase than to remove one. It would have been really difficult to remove the ‘Allahu Akbar’ without making it obvious that it had been edited,” he said.

All this makes it seem most likely that the “Allah Akbar” was taken from another video and mixed with the original sound of the video shot in Brussels.

“The editing was pretty well done,” the engineer admitted.

The doctored version of the video has been viewed more than 200,000 times.