Fazlur Rehman apology video is fake: AI voice dubbed over his NA speech
The viral clip of Maulana Fazlur Rehman begging forgiveness in the National Assembly is AI-made. Where the real footage is, and the other fake this month.
The clip of Maulana Fazlur Rehman pleading for forgiveness in the National Assembly, shared widely on X since Wednesday, is fake. The pictures are real, taken from his speech in the House on 28 October, but the voice saying “I have asked for forgiveness, but they are not accepting it” was generated with AI and laid over the footage.
This is new since our story on Wednesday’s session, where the JUI-F chief threw Khawaja Asif’s famous “koi sharam hoti hai” line back at the defence minister. Within hours of that speech going viral, a doctored version began doing the rounds.
What the fake clip says
In the 26-second video, Fazl appears to ask: “What is my fault? Why are they after me? I have asked for forgiveness, but they are not accepting it.” One account captioned it as Fazl “grovelling in the assembly today for forgiveness”. That post alone passed 20,000 views, and others pushed it further, including Jalal Sherazi, who describes himself as a coordinator at the Prime Minister’s Office, and former Punjab government spokesperson Shahzad Younas Sheikh.
Most of the accounts sharing it, going by their bios and earlier posts, support the PML-N.
How we know it is fake
- The real speech has no apology. The footage matches minute 3:25 to 3:51 of the National Assembly’s own upload of Fazl’s 28 October speech. In the original he talks about PTI’s Gauhar Ali Khan and Asad Qaiser, says he has not met the prime minister in four or five months, and calls for a new Charter of Democracy. He never asks anyone for forgiveness.
- His party’s own upload matches the original. JUI-F’s digital media team posted the speech on X the same day, and it has no such lines.
- The lips don’t match. Watch closely and his mouth moves out of step with the words, a common sign of a dubbed track.
- Detection tools flag the voice. Fact-checkers who ran the audio through several AI detectors got high scores for synthetic speech, from about 67 percent on one tool to 100 percent on another, and one found a digital watermark pointing to an OpenAI model.
Not the first one this month
On 22 October, a different clip spread on Facebook claiming Fazl had apologised for his criticism of the emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. That video was real but old: a July 2026 message he recorded for the Joint Awami Action Committee in Azad Kashmir, posted on JUI-F’s YouTube channel. The audio had been swapped for an AI voice. JUI-F’s digital wing called it fake news at the time.
The same week, the National Accountability Bureau said a separate AI-made video claiming it had sped up an investigation against him was false, and that there had been no change in the status of any inquiry.
Why this matters
Fazl has been one of the loudest critics of governor’s rule in KP, and his speeches are among the most shared political clips in Pakistan right now. That makes him an easy target. A real 26 seconds of him in the Assembly plus a cloned voice is enough to fool people scrolling fast, and on WhatsApp the clip loses any caption or context.
The quick test: before forwarding a shocking clip of a politician, look for the full speech on the National Assembly’s YouTube channel or the person’s own page. If the line is not there, it was never said.
