On 26 March, Twitter user Khalid Aziz shared an image of a mosque with smoke billowing out of it. “Yesterday this mosque was ransacked in Allahabad. Is it the end of secularism in India?” Aziz tweeted.
The tweet has garnered over 200 retweets and has drawn reactions from over 500 people, including the Allahabad Police. The police tweeted out to Aziz, asking him to confirm the location of the mosque.
A closer look at the image reveals that the photo is not from India at all but is that of a mosque set ablaze during clashes in Myanmar in 2013.
On being called out on the authenticity of the image, Aziz responded to the thread (which has already received a lot of reactions), saying:
According to his Twitter bio, Aziz is the chairman of the Regional Institute of Policy Research and Training, a non-profit organisation in Peshawar and the former Chief Secretary of the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Neither his profile, nor the profiles of the organisations he represents or represented, however, are verified.
Only last week, a rumour that BSF jawan Tej Bahadur Yadav had been killed, seemingly originated from a Twitter handle based in Pakistan. Yadav’s wife as well as a BSF spokesperson later rubbished the rumours and confirmed that Yadav was in fact alive.
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