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| - Fact Check: No, viral photo of boy with bullet injury is NOT from 2018 Dalit protests, it's from a foreign film
An image is going viral with the claim that it shows a young boy from Ghaziabad who was allegedly killed during a protest in April 2018.
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India Today Fact Check
This photo is not from Ghaziabad — or from India for that matter. It is a still from a movie called “The Kingdom of Ants” that was released in 2012. The film by Chawki Mejri examines the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In April 2018, lakhs of people across several states in India took to the streets to protest the so-called dilution of the provisions of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. The protest marches on April 2, 2018, turned violent and several people were injured and even killed.
Four years later, on the anniversary of the protest marches, an image went viral on social media with the claim that it was of Nikhil Dhobi of Ghaziabad, a young boy who was allegedly killed during the violence. The photo shows a boy on his knees donning a blood-soaked shirt.
"The fearlessness and valour of this child gives courage to our society and spreads the message of revolution," one such tweet in Hindi read.
The archived versions of the posts can be seen here, here and here.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found the claim along with the image was misleading. This viral image is a still from a movie.
AFWA PROBE
A Bharat Bandh was organised by Dalit organisations on April 2, 2018, against what they saw as the weakening of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. But the protests reportedly turned violent.
Violence was reported across states including Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, and Bihar.
First, setting the custom search range to April 2018, we ran multiple keyword searches on Google to find out if a youngster called Nikhil Dhobi was among the dead. But we couldn't find any reports that corroborated this claim.
Similarly, we also looked for reports of violence in Ghaziabad during the protest. According to a report by Hindustan Times from April 4, 2018, about 5,000 people were booked for creating ruckus and damaging public property in Ghaziabad during the protests. While it stated that nine policemen were injured, there was no mention of the death of a youngster in police firing.
We turned our attention to the image next.
Using reverse image search, we found the same picture shared by a Twitter user in September 2015, who claimed it was from Palestine.
Palestinian boy shot in the chest during 2nd intifada in 2002. Occupation,Oppression and killing still present. pic.twitter.com/nBAj6rBZWP— Abbs Winston (@AbbsWinston) September 12, 2015
This confirmed that the image was older than the Dalit protests of 2018.
Among the top results of the reverse search was a report by AFWA from September 2021 that debunked a claim using the same image that it was of Sunil Sheoran, a teen who died during the 2010 Jat agitation in Haryana's Hisar. However, AFWA found this claim to be baseless.
During the investigation, we found that the viral photo was taken from a movie called "Mamlakat al-Naml", which examined the Palestine-Israel conflict. "The Kingdom of Ants," or "Mamlakat al-Naml", made by Tunisian director Chawki Mejri, was released in 2012.
The boy with the bullet wound was included in the trailer of the movie that was uploaded on YouTube in 2015. The scene can be seen at 3:38 in the video.
We had also found a different clip from the film uploaded on YouTube in 2012. At 1:11 in this video, the same boy could be seen pelting stones at security forces.
Hence, it is certain that the image in question does not show Nikhil Dhobi, a young boy who was allegedly killed during the violence that took place at the Dalit protests in 2018.
(With inputs from Sanjana Saxena in Lucknow)
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