A disturbing video of bodies of a woman and child being dug out from underneath the ground is viral with a communal spin on social media.
Multiple verified handles have tweeted the disturbing footage, which documents a man digging out lifeless bodies of the woman and child, with claims that a Muslim mother and child were buried alive by Hindus.
Nazir Ahmed, member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom, tweeted the distressing footage and claimed that the mother and child, who had been buried by 'fascists in India, had been successfully recovered.' BOOM has chosen not to include the footage, as it is disturbing in nature.
Below is a screenshot of Ahmed's tweet.
Click here to view the tweet and here for its archive.
The same video was tweeted by another verified handle, Faleh Al-Shibly, an author, with claims that Hindus buried the Muslim woman and her son, after killing them. Below is the screenshot of the tweet. Click here to view the archive of the tweet.
Multiple other handles, including one Pakistani major of the armed forces tweeted the same footage with a similar narrative.
The video is viral with similar claims on Facebook.
Fact Check
BOOM was able to ascertain that the video is from the Eastern part of India, as men can be heard speaking in Bengali. Men can heard exclaiming 'aha re,' a colloquial term to express grief or sorrow. Later in the video another man can be heard expressing anguish when the infant's body is dug out. He refers to the child as 'dadu', a way of referring to grandchildren in Bengal. At 1 minute 32 second mark, a man instructs another to keep the corpses as it is, in Bengali.
Upon relevant keyword searches in Bengali, we found footage from the same incident, shot from different angles, uploaded to YouTube, by a user named Er Aftarul Haque. The user had uploaded three different videos from the incident.
One of the videos was described as an incident from Islampur, North Bengal. The description, when translated to English, reads, "Mother and child found after digging, Islampur." (Original text in Bengali: মাটি খুড়ে পাওয়া গেলো শিশু ও তার মা || ইসলামপুর)
Another 22 second long footage of unearthing the dead bodies was described as a crime committed by the husband. "Mother and child buried by husband in Islampur," read the description.
Upon relevant keyword searches, we found the same video that featured as part of a news bulletin of Mahanagar 24X7 Bengali which reported about the incident on January 30.
BOOM also did a comparison between the viral footage, and the video that was played in the news report.
According to reports, the incident occurred in North Dinajpur district's Islampur area (Shujali), and was a case of domestic violence. A man, identified as Akbar Alam, murdered his wife, Noor Jahan and two month old daughter Rizwana, and buried them in the backyard of their house. Angry villagers set Alam's house on fire after the incident. Alam who married the deceased two years ago, was not happy with the birth of a girl child. He killed both the mother and the daughter, on January 29 and buried them. He later fled the area.
Warning: Disturbing Content
The incident was also reported in News 18 Bangla and Ei Samay.
Below is a screenshot from the incident, that was used in Ei Samay.
Warning: Graphic content