News24 | Coffin assault video that shocked SA resurfaces in false claims about Sudan crisis

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

• A graphic 2016 Mpumalanga coffin-assault video is being falsely repackaged online as evidence of atrocities in Sudan.
• The clip, which once sparked national outrage and led to attempted-murder convictions, has no link to the current Sudan conflict.
• Mislabelled posts are fuelling Islamophobic narratives as Sudan faces a worsening humanitarian crisis.

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

The clip included with the post shows a man crouching inside a coffin, wailing as another man forces the lid down over his head.

The video surfaced online as Sudan’s army and a paramilitary group engage in a power struggle that has been going on 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.

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

READ | Silence and complicity: Sudanese ambassador to SA takes aim at global inaction

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions to flee their homes, as recent clashes spread to new regions, raising concerns of an escalating humanitarian disaster.

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

“They must be dealt with very soon; Islam is a threat to the world,” one user wrote.

Another commented: “Cruel foreign invading religions should be reviewed and banned.”

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

Unrelated incident

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the clip found the same video uploaded to the YouTube channel of China Global Television Network on 18 November 2016.

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

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

The footage was also embedded in a report published by media organisation Al Jazeera that said two white men in South Africa were charged with assault after footage emerged showing them forcing a black man into a coffin and threatening to set him on fire.

READ | ‘I was scared for my life’ – man who was forced into coffin

Willem Oosthuizen and Theo Martins Jackson pleaded not guilty to the incident in Mpumalanga, saying they only intended to scare 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 25 August 2017.

The pair had been sentenced to 16 and 19 years in October of the same year, but the Supreme Court of Appeal cut their jail term in 2019.

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