Fact-Check: 2021 Video From West Bengal Falsely Linked to Sandeshkhali Violence
This video is from 2021 in Keshpur, West Bengal when a group of people attacked media personnel vehicles.
Fact-Check: The video is old from 2021 and is not related to the recent incident in Sandeshkhali.
(Source: Altered by The Quint)
A video showing several people attacking a moving car is being shared as a recent incident from Sandeshkhali, West Bengal.
Later in the video, a woman seated inside the car is seen speaking in Bengali to a man.
What is the claim?: Those sharing claimed that even with a woman chief minister in West Bengal, "a female journalist is welcomed" in this manner.
An archive of the post can be found here.
This post recorded 52.3K views at the time of writing this story. (Archives of similar claims can be found here and here.)
What is the truth?: This video is from 2021 from Keshpur in West Bengal and is not related to the recent violence in Sandeshkhali.
The video shows a group of journalists from Zee24 Ghanta being attacked by a group of locals while covering the assembly polls in the state.
How did we find out?: At first, we divided the viral video into multiple keyframes and ran a Google reverse image search on some of them.
We also noticed the logo of Zee's 24 Ghanta channel on the viral video.
Upon conducting the reverse image search, we found the same video on Facebook shared by the Bangla-language news channel Zee 24 Ghanta. It was uploaded on 1 April 2021.
We compared the frames of both videos and found similarities.
Here is a comparison between the two videos.
The video was uploaded with the caption, "Attack on Zee 24 Ghanta car in Keshpur, journalist Maitreyi Bhattacharya was affected while reporting."
Upon conducting a relevant keyword search, we came across news reports by India Today and Zee News from April 2021 about the same incident.
India Today reported that the incident happened shortly after the vehicle of Tanmay Ghosh, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate from the Keshpur Assembly constituency, was attacked.
The police apprehended three individuals in relation to the incident.
In addition, the convoy of BJP leader Pritish Ranjan Kuar was also attacked with stones in Keshpur.
Zee News noted that their correspondents were attacked in Keshpur while doing their work.
Conclusion: It is clear that the video is being falsely linked to the recent violence in Sandeshkhali. The incident is old from Keshpur.
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