Bangladeshi Refugees Ransacking a Kolkata Station? Fake Alert
A video is being circulated with a claim that it shows Bangladeshi refugees ransacking a railway station in Kolkata.
CLAIM
A video which shows a group of men vandalising a railway station is being shared online with a claim that it shows Bangladeshi refugees destroying a Kolkata railway station.
The Quint received a query on its WhatsApp helpline number regarding the same video.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The video in question is not from Kolkata. It is, in fact, from Bangladesh and is as old as January 2016. According to news reports, angry madarsa students went on a rampage and destroyed property at Brahmanbaria Railway Station after the death of a fellow student.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
On analysising the video carefully, around 00:42 seconds, we noticed a board which read ‘Brahmanbaria’ which is a district in Bangladesh.
Taking a cue from here, we ran a Google search with the keywords ‘Brahmanbaria Railway Station vandalism’ and came across multiple news reports from 2016 which had reported on the incident.
According a report published in The Daily Star titled ‘Mayhem at B'baria’, students armed with bamboos and sticks removed the fishplates of the railway tracks and ransacked an Awami League office. However, the article had no to the visuals shown in the video.
We then searched with with ‘B’baria Mayhem’ and saw a picture which was similar to the visuals in the video. The picture appeared in Daily Sun and the article dealt with the same incident.
So, an old incident from Bangladesh has been shared with a false claim that it shows Bangladeshi refugees vandalising a Kolkata railway station.
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