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Indian Murder Wrongly Claimed as BD Rape Incident: Rumor Scanner
The fact-checking organization Rumor Scanner has debunked a viral video circulating on online platforms, falsely claiming that a woman was recently raped and had her tongue cut out in Bangladesh. The video, however, actually depicts an incident that took place in India.
"The video being spread is of a recent event in India, not Bangladesh. It falsely claims that a woman was raped and mutilated, which is untrue," Rumor Scanner clarified.
In a report published on its website, Rumor Scanner detailed how the video shows a severely injured woman sitting by the roadside while people ask her questions. The misleading posts circulating alongside the video falsely identified the woman as a tourist and made multiple unverified claims, including that she was gang-raped in Teknaf or attacked on the streets of Cumilla. The posts also suggested that her tongue was cut off either during the rape or to prevent her from speaking.
Upon investigation, Rumor Scanner found that the woman, when questioned about her origin, mentioned "Murshidabad," a district in West Bengal, India. This clue led to further research, where a report titled "Woman’s body recovered from the edge of a paddy field in Joynagar, police investigating" was found on the Indian news website News 18, dated January 22.
The report confirmed that the woman, whose body was found on January 20 in a rural area near Joynagar, West Bengal, had been shot, beaten, and suffered severe facial injuries, including broken teeth. She was later declared dead at the hospital.
Additional investigation revealed similar footage on YouTube, where the video was identified as being related to the Joynagar case. Further confirmation came from a post on Facebook by an Indian user, Rekha Patra, which also identified the video as originating in West Bengal.
Based on these findings, Rumor Scanner concluded that the video in question was indeed from India, not Bangladesh, and it had been falsely shared online with misleading claims about rape and mutilation.
Rumor Scanner emphasized that this was an example of a cross-border incident being falsely attributed to Bangladesh, urging caution against spreading unverified content.