Viral video shows student being beaten by classmate’s guardian, not teacher
A video recently circulated on Facebook with the claim that a teacher was seen torturing a student. However, Dismislab’s fact-check has found that the claim is not true. The person beating the student in the video is not a school teacher, but the guardian of a classmate of the student who was beaten.
The video was posted on October 8 from a page named “SOHAG FIRE.” The 19-second video is divided into two parts. In the upper part, a man is seen slamming a student in school uniform to the ground several times inside a classroom and continuously beating him with punches and blows. Many students nearby can be seen in the video. In the lower part of the video, the poster can be seen speaking. He says, “This can never be an education system. You see, where a student is not safe with the teacher, how can this be an education system there! This can be called a club or a place of terror and torture. You can see how our students will learn if they are abused like this and what they will learn from them!”(verbatim). The caption reads, “Bangladesh’s school system.”
As of the publication of this report, the video had been viewed more than 56,000 times and shared more than 950 times. More than 1,400 users had reacted to the video.
In the course of the investigation, a reverse image search was conducted using keyframes from the video. This led to a 2-minute-28-second video report published on the YouTube channel of the news outlet Prothom Alo on October 1. The report’s headline read, “Guardian of Classmate Enters Classroom, Lifts Student and Slams Him to the Ground.” According to the report, a guardian was accused of entering a classroom at a school in Sirajdikhan Upazila, Munshiganj, beating a sixth-grade student and slamming him to the ground several times. An exact match was found between the report’s scenes and the circulating video.
In a detailed verification, a keyframe search showed that multiple news outlets (1, 2, 3, 4) published detailed reports on the incident. These reports reveal that the incident occurred on the morning of October 1 at Rajdia Abhoy Pilot School and College in Sirajdikhan upazila. On September 30, a fight broke out between two students of the same class named Md. Habib Bhuiyan and Atiqur Rahman; the school authorities settled the matter and asked the guardians of both students to come to the school. Following that incident, on October 1, Nahid Sheikh, the cousin of Atiqur Rahman, entered the classroom and beat Habib Bhuiya, slamming him to the ground. The entire scene was captured on the school’s CCTV camera. Police have arrested the accused guardian.
In other words, the claim that a school teacher is beating a student is false. Essentially, as an aftermath of a quarrel between two classmates, the guardian of one was beating the other student.
