CLAIM
A video of a man shooting a deer and killing it went viral on social media with the claim that the incident took place in West Bengal and that the man wielding the gun is a West Bengal Forest Officer.
The message in Bengali with the video says: “আজকে একটা প: ব: ফরেস্ট অফিসার একটা হরিণ কে মেরে দিল। এই ভিডিও টা চারিদিকে ছড়িয়ে দিন যাতে জেল হয়” (Today, a West Bengal Forest Officer killed a deer. Make this video viral so that he is jailed.)
The gruesome video shows a man taking aim at a herd of deer and then eventually shooting and killing one. As the injured deer drops to the ground, the men in the video run towards it, while the shooter asks, “Where’s the knife?” He is handed one and he, along with the other men, run towards the animal, saying “Quickly, quickly.”
“Take a video,” he says and then proceeds to slit open the animal’s neck.
The video has been shared on Twitter and Facebook with the same claim.
A Twitter user also shared the video claiming that the video was from Sunderbans, West Bengal.
One person shared the video asking for action to be taken against the people in the video and tagged the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change in the tweet.
WHAT’S THE TRUTH?
While the incident in the video took place, it is actually from Bangladesh and not from India at all. Moreover, the incident took place in 2015.
WHAT WE FOUND
While going through the various posts of this video on Twitter, we came across a clarification issued on the video by IFS officer Parveen Kaswan.
He said that the video was being circulated for the last week and that it was from Chittagong, Bangladesh. He further said that the video, when it had surfaced had been flagged to the Bangladesh authorities. The person in the video had been identified as Moin Uddin and it was found that the incident happened in Chittagong’s Hillsdale Farm.
On searching for news reports about such an incident, we came across an article by The Daily Star, a Bangladeshi English-language newspaper. The report, dated July 2015, said the incident had happened in the last week of June, and said that the video had first been uploaded on Facebook in July 2015.
According to a follow-up report published in the same month, the Department of Forest (DoF) had initiated actions against Moin Uddin.
Therefore, while the incident is from 2015, it is not from India, contrary to the claims.
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