Did Muslims in Sri-Lanka destroy mosque? Fact Check!

A Facebook user named ‘Ashish Kurla’ shared a post on a page named ‘फिर एक बार मोदी सरकार’ dated 13 June 2019. The post has a photograph in it, which shows that some Muslims are breaking a building with a hammer. The post as translated from Hindi quoted “In Sri Lanka, Muslims are breaking their own mosque and accepting into Hindu religion. Muslims say that we now understand the reality of Islam’s abominable and hateful reality.” As per this post’s claim, Muslims in Sri-Lanka are breaking the mosque because they have lost faith in Islam and accepting Hindu religion. Let us see what the facts are!  

NARRATIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

FacebookPost | ArchivedLink

FACT CHECK:

We searched the photograph in the post using ‘Google Reverse Image Search’. What we got in the search is below:

We came across a news broadcast by ‘Tempo.co‘ on 7 June 2019, originally broadcast by BBC Indonesia. The news states that to protest against terrorist organisation – the National Tauhid Jamaat, believed to be responsible for Sri Lankan’s Easter bombings, the local Muslims crushed the mosque used by members of this terrorist organization.

On April 21, the bomb blasts in Sri Lanka killed about 250 people. After this, the people of the local Muslim community started being attacked. For this reason, this mosque, created by the National Tauhid Jamaat, was demolished.

TempoPost | ArchivedLink

Apart from this, we got another news broadcast by ‘Daily Mirror’ on 29 May 2019. This news also states that given the current situation, this mosque was demolished since the members of National Tauhid Jamaat used it.

DailyMirrorPost | ArchivedLink

After this, we got another news broadcast by ‘sangbadpratidin.in’. This news reveals the reasons for the mosque demolished by the Muslims. The news states that the reason why local Muslims hammered the main mosque of Madatugama is because it was used by the members of the terrorist organization ‘National Tauhid Jamaat’ and had also invested foreign money in it.

SangbadpratidinPost | ArchivedLink

We also found a tweet by Sunil Jayasri, retweeted by BBC reporter Ajam Amin. In this tweet, the reason for breaking the mosque is the same as reported in all the news.

TwitterPost | ArchivedTweet

It is clear from the research that the Sri Lankan Muslims did not break the mosque because they lost their faith in Islam. They took this step to handle the situations that started after the 21 April bomb blasts. The members of the terrorist organization National Towhid Jamaat used to worship in this now demolished mosque. Not only was it involved in the Sri Lankan blasts but also had investments of foreign money.

Apart from this, no such news claimed that the Sri Lankan Muslims are now tired of Islam and are accepting Hindu religion. The reason linked to Hinduism for breaking the mosque is to deceive the readers.

IN CONCLUSION:

Fact Crescendo has fact checked and confirms that the photograph is being share in the post with a wrong narrative. We categorise the story as FALSE.

FactCrescendo advises its readers to refrain from sharing such misleading and communally biased photographs and do a self-check on the true narrative of such incidents before believing them.