Photo of teenage Girl Who Died by Suicide in 2020 circulates with false claims
Recently, a photo of a teenage girl has been circulating on social media platform Facebook, claiming she died due to excessive bleeding during her first period. Multiple users shared the same claim on their profiles, pages and groups. However, fact-check by Dismislab shows the photo is old and not related to this incident. The original photo is of a teenage girl who died by suicide in 2020.
On different Facebook profiles (1, 2, 3), pages (1, 2, 3) and groups (1, 2, 3), the same photo was posted with the claim that the teenage girl died during her first menstruation. They further claimed that from the beginning of menstruation she had been suffering from fever, abdominal pain and excessive bleeding. After lying in bed for ten days, when her condition worsened, she was taken to a doctor. The incident was described as occurring in a remote village near the Sundarbans. The posts said the girl died for a lack of proper hygiene during menstruation and absence of proper treatment. In the photos, the lifeless body of a young girl is seen on a cot covered with a red sheet. At the end of each post, the name “Khalid Bin Mojahid” is mentioned as the source.
Searching with several keywords on Facebook, the oldest post about the same incident was found on April 7, on a Facebook page named “Nari.” The post was shared jointly with a profile named “Khalid Bin Mojahid.” That post used a different symbolic photo. When Dismislab contacted the operator of the Khalid Bin Mojahid profile directly, he said the incident was true and the text of the post was his own. But he confirmed that the girl in the viral photo was not related to the incident. Khalid said: “The incident happened in West Dhangmari village, Banishanta Union, Dacope police station in Khulna district on April 6, 2025. I wrote the post the following morning.” He also said: “The photo that has gone viral now was not the one I used then.”
To verify the source of the photo, Dismislab conducted a reverse image search. The photo was found in reports published in 2020 by two online news outlets—Khabar Bangla and Alokito Projonmo. According to Tangail-based online paper Khabar Bangla, this was a photo of Jhuma Akter, a sixth-grade student of Nagarpur upazila in Tangail. The girl died by suicide on September 11, 2020. At that time, the same incident was also reported by other media outlets, including RTV and Delta Times, but without any photo.
In other words, the photo has no connection with the premature death of the teenage girl from a remote village in Khulna described in Khalid Bin Mojahid’s post. A photo from a different incident almost five years earlier is now being circulated on Facebook as if it were recent.
Disclaimer: The original version of this fact-check report was published in Bengali on Dismislab’s Bengali website on June 29, 2025. The English translation was completed later; however, to maintain time accuracy and avoid any potential misinterpretation, the English version has been published with the original publication date.
