Unrelated Video Falsely Shared as One Showing Mistreatment of Muslims in Nepal

The video is from Bangladesh's Cumilla and predates the clashes in Nepal.

A video showing a group of boys assaulting a man tied to a tree is being shared on social media, where users have claimed that it shows a Muslim man being mistreated in Nepal.

• The claim comes against the backdrop of the recent communal clashes in southern Nepal, where three people were killed during unrest between the Hindu and Muslim communities.

(An archived version of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here and here.)

Is it true?: No, because the video is from Cumilla, Bangladesh and predates the communal clashes in Nepal.

How did we find out the truth?: One of the videos in the claim carried the watermark for an Instagram account with the username 'md.soimul'.

• Taking a cue from this, we looked for this profile on the platform and saw that it had shared a longer version of the video from the claim, without any context.

View this post on Instagram

• The account had posted this video on 15 July, over ten days before violence broke out in Nepal's Sunsari on 27 July.

• We also saw that this account was based in Bangladesh.

• This establishes that the video predates the clashes in Nepal, which have claimed three lives, as mentioned in this Al Jazeera report.

• In the longer version of the video, we saw signage and text written in Bangla, which indicates that the video is not from Nepal, because the country uses Devnagri as its language's script.

One of these signs, when translated, read 'Dakshin Vinglabari Kendriya Jame Masjid'.

• A keyword search showed us that Vinglabari is a village in the Comilla district of Bangladesh.

• Taking clues from these findings, a search for the place on Google Maps showed us a similar location in Debidwar in Bangladesh's Chittagong division.

On comparing this street view to the video in question, we were able to confirm that both visuals show the same place in Bangladesh.

Conclusion: A video from Bangladesh is being shared with the false claim that it shows a Muslim man being mistreated in Nepal.

(With inputs from Tanvir Mahatab Abir and Raqeeb Raza.)

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