Fact-Check: Video related to family dispute falsely shared with communal spin. Here’s the Truth

A video showing some locals thronged near a suitcase, has gone viral on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Users shared this video and associated it with a communal spin by claiming that a Muslim man named Akram had killed a Hindu woman on the false pretext of marriage.

An account with the username @Khushi_kolkata shared this video and wrote: “Today again an Abdul completed his Target. Those who say my Abdul is not like this, look, his Abdul was also not like this. But today I have found him in a suitcase. In Bengal, Akram a man lured a Hindu girl into marriage and threw her to death at the river bank”

Fact-Check

To investigate the viral claim and the video, the DFRAC team reverse-searched some keyframes generated from the viral video, using Google Lens. We found a report by Indian Express on YouTube. Visuals in the viral video were similar to the YouTube report of Indian Express. Moreover, the report’s description read: “two women, Aarti Ghosh and Falguni Ghosh, were arrested after locals caught them attempting to dump a dead body at the Ganga Ghat in Kumartuli. The women, mother and daughter from Madhyamgram, tried to disguise the body of an older woman, Sumita Ghosh, as a dog’s carcass but were caught when locals insisted on inspecting the trolley. Police recovered the body and arrested the women.

For Further investigation, we searched for keywords on Google related to the above description and came across some of the latest reports by The Times Of India, The Hindu, and NDTV. As per reports, two women, Falguni Ghosh and her mother Aarati Ghosh, came to Kumartuli between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Tuesday in a white cab. They were moving suspiciously, carrying a trolley bag. Locals called the police who detained them and found a woman’s dead body in the bag, as told by Kolkata Police Commissioner Manoj Kumar Verma on Monday.

The reports further stated that according to Ms. Falguni Ghosh’s statement to the police, the body was that of her father-in-law’s sister, Sumita Ghosh. The deceased is a native of Jorhat in Assam and had come to Madhyamgram on February 11. From preliminary questioning, we have found there was an altercation between the mother-daughter duo, and the deceased, over a family dispute, last evening. The latter was physically manhandled in that conflict,” the Police Commissioner said

Certainly, the case is related to a domestic altercation within a family. No communal angle has been found in this case.

Conclusion

It is clear from DFRAC’s fact-check that the viral video has been misleadingly shared on X. Originally, the video is associated with the murder case that has emerged from a family dispute in West Bengal. There is no communal angle found in this case. Hence, the claim made by the users is misleading.

Analysis: Misleading