Body of Lakshmipur schoolboy falsely portrayed as victim of BNP-NCP clash in Habiganj
A video was recently circulated on Facebook claiming that one person was killed after being shot during a clash between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and the National Citizen Party (NCP) in Habiganj. However, Dismislab’s fact-check has found that the video is more than a month old and relates to the death of a schoolboy in Lakshmipur.
A 31-second video was posted on July 28 from a Facebook account named Shipon Islam. In the video, a person is seen wailing in front of a body placed on the ground. The video’s caption claims, “One person killed after being shot in BNP- NCP clash in Habiganj…”
As of the publication of this report, the video had been viewed more than 150,000 times and shared more than 850 times. In the comments, one person asked which party the deceased individual belonged to. Another wrote, “To those who carried out this noble deed, I say — the nation will remain eternally grateful to you.” One person described the matter as a “rehearsal for a drama.”
In the course of the investigation, a reverse image search was conducted using key frames from the video. This search led to a video published on June 17 on a Facebook page named “Amar TV 24,” which matched the circulated video. That post read, “The shoulder that once carried a child’s dreams was the same shoulder that carried the son’s body home.” When contacted, the page’s administrator stated that the video was of an incident following the killing of a student at a hostel in Lakshmipur, over an accusation of mobile phone theft.
A keyword search found videos of the same incident posted from multiple accounts on Facebook on June 17 and 18 (1, 2). A post from an account named Badsha Fahad mentioned the identity of the deceased and details of the incident. This June 17 post stated that, the previous day, a student named Mehedi had been killed at the hostel of Farid Ahmed Bhuiyan Academy in Ramganj. The post stated that his body had been recovered from the hostel and taken to Chatkhil Hospital.
In its investigation, Dismislab found detailed reports published on June 17 in multiple news media outlets, including The Daily Star and Jugantor. According to Jugantor’s report, on June 16, the body of an eighth-grade resident student was recovered from the hostel of Farid Ahmed Bhuiyan Academy in Ramganj upazila, Lakshmipur. Following the loss of an iPhone belonging to a student in the college section, nine senior students beat Mehedi on suspicion of theft, resulting in his death. It was alleged that the body was later hung from the window grille in an attempt to conceal the incident.
In other words, the video circulated with the claim that a person was killed after being shot in a BNP-NCP clash in Habiganj is, in fact, from the incident of a schoolboy’s death in Ramganj, Lakshmipur. It has no connection whatsoever to any political clash in Habiganj.
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.
