A disturbing video showing a woman being harassed for converting and marrying a Muslim in Bangladesh has surfaced on social media and is being falsely linked to the rape and murder of a woman in Pingla, West Bengal that occurred on May 3.
A 20-year-old woman was raped and murdered by two construction workers in West Medinipur earlier this week. Soon after the incident netizens falsely claimed that the victim was a Bharatiya Janata Party karyakarta and had been attacked by Trinamool Congress goons for her political affiliation. BOOM reached out to the family of the deceased and Pingla Police who denied any political angle to her death. According to family members, the woman was lured and assaulted by the masons in a mud house in her backyard that they were renovating.
Read BOOM's fact check here.
The video shows unsettling visuals of a woman being carried away by a few men, and has been captioned 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."
(In Hindi: भाजपा कार्यकर्ता बूथ पोलिंग एजेंट *** बंगाल टीएमसी को इससे बड़ा सबूत भी चाहिए क्या उठा के ले जाते हुए लड़की को दिन दहाड़े 15-20 गुण्डो द्वारा बलात्कार और फिर हत्या दरअसल बंगाल इंसानों का नहीं हैवानों का गढ़ हैं ओर यहां लोग खुश हो रहे की सही हुआ)
The post has been archived.
The video is viral on Facebook with the same narrative.
Fact Check
BOOM was able to ascertain that the video is from Bangladesh as people in the viral clip can be heard speaking in a heavy Eastern Bengali accent. We broke the video into key frames and ran a reverse image search on a few of the frames. We were directed to a Bangladeshi Facebook user named Rahmat Ali Helali's post featuring 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 police's help. 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 cue from this, we did a keyword search and found media reports on the incident.
According to a report published by Amader Shomoy, 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.
The report states, "Daulatkhan Police Officer-in-Charge (OC) Bazlur Rahman said the girl was a minor and they had no legal status to convert or marry." Daulatkhan Thana also wrote a post on Facebook stating the same about the incident.
Dhaka Post reported 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.
We also found a Facebook post where Kamrul can be seen narrating the incident.
Several Bangladeshi YouTube channels also shared videos related to the incident.
(With Inputs from BOOM Bangladesh)
Also Read: Old Photo Of Injured Bangladeshi Woman Peddled As WB Post-poll Violence
This story has been published as a part of Ekta Consortium – a collaboration of six fact-checking organisations in India.