Were Weapons Seized From A Mosque In Gujarat? A FactCheck

A set of three old and unrelated images from 2016 is viral on social media with false claims that police recovered weapons from a mosque in Gujarat.

The collage shows swords of different sizes displayed along with police and the accused, in one of the photographs.

“Weapons seized from a mosque in Gujarat. What do Muslims want to do ultimately? If we check the mosques throughout the country, we might get such weapons.” the caption accompanying the post claims.

(Original text in Hindi: अब गुजरात की एक #मज्जिद में हथियारों का जखीरा मिला....इन #शांतिदूतों द्वारा कुछ तो #साजिश_रची जा रही है , भारत की सुरक्षा एजेंसियों को सतर्क रहना होगा प्रत्येक #मज्जिद__मदरसों की गहन जांच की जरूरत है ! )

The same set of images is viral on Twitter with an identical narrative.

I had tweeted recently that in Muslim majority areas in Kerala, as far back as the 1990s the Peaceful community had started stockpiling weapons in every home. Actually they are preparing for civil war. This arms haul is from a madrassa in Rajkot. pic.twitter.com/fnDUzZ01rh

— Rakesh Krishnan Simha (@ByRakeshSimha) July 31, 2019

The same photographs were viral in 2017 with a similar claim on WhatsApp and Twitter. BOOM had then pointed out to a Twitter user, that the images are old and unrelated.

Viral with a communal narrative earlier as well

The images were viral earlier this year on Facebook on multiple pages with the false narrative that the weapons were recovered from a temple in India. The same was debunked by Boom Bangla.

BOOM ran a reverse image search and found that the images are of an operation led by the Rajkot Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) and Kuvadava Police. The team busted an illegal weapons trade that was being operated from a hotel near Chotila on the Rajkot Ahmedabad highway.

The same images can be seen in a 2016 tweet by Gujarat Headline News.

#Rajkot: stock of #lethal #weapons found from #Novelty #store; 5 persons arrested https://t.co/oJrQBHE7Sp #Gujarat pic.twitter.com/A9jRB77W2r

— GujaratHeadline News (@GujaratHeadline) March 5, 2016

The same was reported here and here.

A reverse image search of the photograph of guns lying on the table and sofa revealed that it was picked up from a Tumblr post on guns dated March 3, 2019.