Old video used to falsely identify Awami League leader as BNP leader
A video showing a woman and a man embracing has recently been circulating on Facebook under the claim that it involves a leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). A fact-check by Dismislab found the claim to be false. The same video had also been posted in 2021. According to the caption of that earlier post and subsequent news reports, the man in the video is Chitto Ranjan Das, who was an Awami League leader at the time.
The oldest post with this claim was found on a Facebook profile named “Abir Hashmi.” The video was posted at 10:48pm on July 21. The post read, “Video of the BNP leader’s gentleman playing ludo — we have many more such video clips. We are deliberately not releasing them. If you force us, we will.” As of the time this report was published, the post had received more than 700 reactions and had been shared more than 2,800 times.
At 11:39pm the same day, the video was uploaded with an identical caption from a profile named “Daripalla Daripalla.”
The video was later widely shared and drew significant engagement after it was posted from an account named “Touhid Islam Hridoy” on July 22 at 5:31pm. As of the time this report was published, that post had received more than 1,400 reactions, had been shared more than 1,400 times and had been viewed more than 115,000 times.
Through a keyword search, Dismislab found 32 such posts, uploaded from multiple personal profiles, pages and groups.
A reverse image search of keyframes from the video led to a matching video that had been posted on Facebook in 2021. The caption of that post read, “Objectionable video of Chitto Ranjan Das, general secretary of Sabujbagh Thana Awami League, leaked. Chitto Ranjan Das is councilor of Ward No. 5 of Dhaka South City Corporation.”
A subsequent keyword search also surfaced multiple news reports on the incident (1, 2, 3). These reports revealed that the man in the video is not a BNP leader. He is Chitto Ranjan Das, who at the time served as the councilor of Ward No. 5 of Dhaka South City Corporation and as general secretary of Sabujbagh Thana Awami League.
The reports further stated that after the video went viral in 2021, the woman involved filed a case at Sabujbagh Police Station. The case was filed against Chitto Ranjan Das under Bangladesh’s law addressing violence against women and children. Dhaka Mahanagar Dakshin (South) Awami League subsequently suspended Chitto Ranjan Das from the party on charges of violating party discipline.
In conclusion, the man in the video is not a BNP leader. He is Chitto Ranjan Das, who was an Awami League leader at the time.
All social media captions, quotations, and news excerpts in this article have been translated into English from the languages in which they were originally posted or published.
