An old image of a passenger boat capsized on the Buriganga River from Dhaka, Bangladesh falsely linked to a boat capsizing incident in Assam which happened on September 8.
A picture of people sitting in distressed condition on the banks of a drain is going viral on social media. Apart from women, men, there are also some children seen in the image. It is being claimed that these are the illegal migrants who entered Assam.
Sharing this picture, BJP leader and former Mayor of North Delhi Municipal Corporation, Ravinder Gupta wrote, "The jobs that the people of the country want are taken by infiltrators, food grains are also available to those who work to break the security of the country. The BJP government is moving in the direction of freeing the country from infiltrators, the Congress party cannot stop us."
In our investigation, we found that the viral claim is misleading. The viral image is from Myanmar, not Assam
After doing reverse image research on google, we found that the same photo appeared in a report by Pakistani news website "Dawn" on 26 January 2020. The caption accompanying the picture here states that "More than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims were forced to flee northern Rakhine state in 2017 after a military crackdown that the UN has said was executed with genocidal intent."
We also found the same image in a photo story by Outlook.
In both the articles, the image attribution was given to Associated Press (AP). So we checked the archives and found the image was published in 2017.
The caption along with the image reads"Newly arrived Rohingya Muslims, who crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, rest on an embankment after spending a night in the open as they have been prevented from moving ahead towards refugee camps by Bangladesh border guard soldiers at Palong Khali, Bangladesh, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2017. Thousands more Rohingya Muslims are fleeing large-scale violence and persecution in Myanmar and crossing into Bangladesh, where more than half a million others are already living in squalid and overcrowded camps, according to witnesses and a drone video shot by the U.N. office for refugees. "
In conclusion, although it is true that there is a large number of illegal migrants in Assam. But the picture that is going viral on social media is from Myanmar.
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Himani Joshi
Contact: @@Himani_joshi200
Bachelor of Journalism & Mass Communication
It often happens with us all, that we hear news, sometimes it sound unusual, sometimes we also know that this news can’t be true but because the news is all over the place, we eventually believe it. How many of you have heard news about mob lynchi...
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