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Video from Bangladesh shared as rape and murder incident in West Bengal
Bengal’s State Assembly election results were announced on 2nd May, 2012. Since then, there have been reports of clashes between political parties from different parts of the state. Somewhere there are allegations that a group of people have killed the supporters of another party and somewhere there have been incidents of burning the party office. This has caused a stir at the national level. Various pictures, posts and videos of such clashes are being shared on social media.
Recently, a video was shared on social media claiming that around 15 to 20 TMC workers abducted a young girl and raped and murdered her in West Bengal. A disturbing video showing a woman being harassed is being shared along with this claim. We can see the woman screaming while few men pick her up and leave.
This video is being shared to the context to the rape and murder of a woman in Pingla, West Bengal that occurred on May 3. Please note that Fact Crescendo has not mentioned the name of the women claimed in the post.
The caption of the post mentions as, "BJP worker booth polling agent ****. Does Bengal TMC need any bigger proof than this? 15-20 goons abducted, raped and killed the girl. Bengal is not actually a place for humans, it's for beasts. And, people are feeling happy thinking that right thing happened there."
Facebook Post | Archive Link | Facebook
Recently, a 20-year-old woman was raped and murdered by two construction workers in West Medinipur. This incident was falsely shared claiming that the victim was a Bharatiya Janata Party karyakarta and had been attacked by Trinamool Congress goons for her political affiliation. Fact Crescendo reached out to Pingla Police who denied any political angle to her death.
Read our Fact Check here:
Fact Check-
We started our investigation by carefully observing the video where we heard people speaking in Eastern Bengali accent. We broke the video into key frames with the help of InVid-We Verify and ran a reverse image search on a few of the frames. The results led us to a Bangladeshi Facebook user named Rahmat Ali Helali's post where we saw a longer version of the same video that was uploaded on April 27, 2021. According to the post, the woman in the video has been identified as Srabanti Rani alias Jannatul Ferdous who was forcibly handed over to her Hindu parents by the local influential people with the local police's help. The post further mentioned that the incident took place at Daulatkhan in Bhola, Bangladesh. In the video, Srabanti Rani alias Jannatul Ferdous can be seen protesting and saying that she will not go with her parents and that she will be with her husband Kamrul.
Taking a clue from this post we ran a keyword search on Google to find relevant news reports on the viral video. We found that a news report published by Amader Shomoy which stated Srabanti Rani married Kamrul Islam and was converted to Islam. When her father Shankar Chandra Mandal filed a written complaint of abduction and a case under the Women and Child Abuse Prevention Act, Srabanti was 'rescued' by the local police and handed over to her family.
We also found a news report by Dhaka Post stating that Srabanti's husband Kamrul claimed his wife was 18 years old. It further stated that Srabanti Rani was born on 3 March 2003 in Gazipur to Shankar Chandra Mandal and Niyati Rani Mandal.
With a further keyword search, we found a Facebook post by Daulatkhan Thana who stated that Daulatkhan Police Officer-in-Charge (OC) Bazlur Rahman said the girl was a minor and they had no legal status to convert or marry.
Kamrul can be seen narrating the similar incident on a Facebook video.
Conclusion- Fact Crescendo found the above-mentioned post to be False. The viral video on social media is from Bangladesh and has no relation with the alleged post poll violence in West Bengal.
Title:Video from Bangladesh shared as rape and murder incident in West Bengal
Fact Check By: Aavya RayResult: False
