Photo Of UP Suicide Victim Shared As Minor Murdered In Kolkata

A photo of a teenage suicide victim from Uttar Pradesh is being shared as the eight-year-old girl who was found brutally raped and murdered in Kolkata's Jorabagan area.

The photo of a 16-year-old suicide victim from Etah, Uttar Pradesh who jumped off a building after she was allegedly molested and later blackmailed. The pictures are being shared on social media claiming it is a picture of the minor eight-year-old whose rape and murder created outrage in Kolkata, West Bengal.

BOOM has blurred the name and photo of the suicide victim under provisions of the Prevention of Sexual Offences Against Children.

The picture has captions claiming the incident is from Kolkata and criticise Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

FACT CHECK

We noticed that the viral photo showed the girl in a school uniform with Etah written on it which is a district in Uttar Pradesh. Using this as a cue, we ran a reverse image search for the picture with the keyword as 'Etah' and found news stories dating back to October 2020 about a teenager who died after jumping from the top floor of a under construction building.

According to a October 27, 2020 story in Hindi daily Amar Ujala, the photo is of a minor victim who took the drastic step after being repeatedly harassed by a man who was a former tenant in her house. The stories report that the accused allegedly had photos of the victim in his phone and was blackmailing her.

The incident was reported in several news websites including Times Now, India TV and Indian Express with a police statement that the accused was arrested and booked under sections of the POCSO Act.

What Happened In Jorabagan, Kolkata

We then searched for details about the Jorabagan case and found that the case is from Feb 5, 2021 when an 8-year-old girl was brutally raped and murdered in Kolkata's in an abandoned building in Jorabagan.

We reached out to Murlidhar Sharma, Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime), Kolkata who said that the viral photo does not belong to the Jorabagan victim. "The photo is not related to the recent incident in Kolkata,"he said and added that the police after investigations had arrested two people -Ram Kumar a security guard in the victim's building and Ranbir Tanty, his accomplice from Bihar.

According to a report in Times of India, the minor girl was a resident of Sovabazar and had been reported missing from her maternal uncle's house.