Religion

Old image shared to claim Rajasthan’s Karauli riot victim as a rioter

Written by Facto News Desk

A Bhartiya Janta Party worker from Gujarat, Dinesh Desai, shared a collage of two images; the first image is of a victim of the recent communal clash from Rajasthan’s Karauli, and the second image is of a skullcapped man seen pelting stone.

The first image shows an emotionally broken old Muslim man standing by a dilapidated shop, and the second image shows an old man involved in the riot.  Both the images are used together with the intent to show that both men are the same, while he is crying in the one image and is involved in the riot in the other image.

However, we found that the second image is on the internet from 2016 and is not from the recent communal clash of Rajasthan’s Karauli.

Desai shared the collage with the caption: सच्चाई (Truth) and the text on the first image reads “on-camera’ and on the second image  “off-camera”.

(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

At the time of writing this fact-checking article, the post by the BJP worker received high engagement with over 4.6K retweets, 16.6k like and 132 quote tweets.

FactO Check:

Image: 1

Meer Faisal, a journalist on Tuesday, 12 April, posted a video clip on Twitter of the man in the first image. Faisal reports that the old man is Najmuddin from Karauli, Rajasthan. He owned a small shop selling dry fruits and spices which were looted and burned in the riot.

Freelance journalist, Samriddhi Sakunia,  also reported in an article published on 14 April that the dry fruits and spices shop of 70-year-old Najmuddin was fully burnt which stood in Boora Batasha Gali of Rajasthan’s Karauli.

Image: 2

On conducting the reverse image search of the second image, we found that the image has been on the Internet since 2016 and have used several times with different misleading claims.

We found the image posted by a Twitter user in January 2016, the user claims that the image is of the Malda riots. We then searched for the news reports of the Malda riot and corroborated that a riot had broken out in Kaliachak, Malda district of West Bengal in January 2016; however, we couldn’t independently verify the origin of the image.

Conclusion:

With the above finding, it can be concluded that both the images are not related.  Desai posted the image intending to mislead people.

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Facto News Desk

FACTO™ is a registered trademark of FACTO Digital Media (OPC) Private Limited, Trademark registered with the trademark registry of India under the Trademark act 1999. FactO News of FACTO Digital Media (OPC) Private Limited is an independent fact-checking platform committed to fighting misinformation/disinformation, false and fake news that we come across social media and mainstream media. We provide our readers with verified facts and educate them on issues that focus on but not limited to political, communal, and social aspects.

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