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| - Fact Check: This is not a Congress leader arrested for plotting attack on Hindus
The Hindi caption along with the images translates to, "Congress leader from Assam Amjat Ali arrested with weapons and bullets in apple boxes. He was planning to kill kafirs. Police caught him. Hindus, they are fully prepared."
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India Today Fact Check
No such arrest has been reported recently. The man is a madrasa teacher in Bangladesh held for sexually harassing a minor girl. The weapons were recovered after an encounter in Kashmir. Both images are from 2018.
Two images - one of a man in handcuffs and another of bullets and grenades - are going viral on social media with the claim that a Muslim leader of the Congress was arrested in Assam for planning to carry out genocide against Hindus.
The Hindi caption along with the images translates to, "Congress leader from Assam Amjat Ali arrested with weapons and bullets in apple boxes. He was planning to kill kafirs. Police caught him. Hindus, they are fully prepared."
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the viral claim to be false. No Congress leader was arrested with weapons in Assam recently. The two-year-old images along with the claim are from Bangladesh and Kashmir.
The archived versions of similar posts can be seen here, here and here.
Who's the man arrested?
We could not find credible reports from Assam regarding the arrest of a Congress leader on charges of hiding explosives and plotting an attack. AFWA shared the viral post with GP Singh, ADGP (law and order), Assam, who confirmed to us that the man in handcuffs is not from Assam and no such arrest of a Congress leader has been reported in the state.
"No such arrest has been reported in Assam till now. Also, the man in the picture cannot be from Assam as the police uniform is not ours. Our cyber cell is looking into the matter," Singh told AFWA.
We checked with India Today's Assam correspondent Hemanta Kumar Nath, who also confirmed that there has been no such arrest of a Congress leader, even in the bordering districts of the state. He further said there is no prominent Congress leader by the name Amjat Ali in Assam.
For better clarity, we did a reverse image search of both the images.
Reverse-searching the image of the man in handcuffs, we found it is more than two years old and from Bangladesh. Also, as pointed out by GP Singh, we noticed the uniform of the officers standing beside the man closely resembles that of Bangladesh and not India.
We found that the same picture was carried by several news reports from Bangladesh in May 2018.
According to these reports, the man in the image is Mobarak Hossain, a local madrasa teacher from Trishal Upazila of Mymensingh district in Bangladesh. He was arrested for allegedly sexually harassing a minor girl, who later killed herself.
We found some other reports in Bangla on the incident. These carried a different picture of the same man. "The Daily Star" reported the incident in English on May 6, 2018.
The weapons
We also did a reverse search of the second image of bullets and grenades lying beside apples.
We found the same image uploaded on the official Twitter handle of Jammu and Kashmir Police on October 29, 2018. The caption says, "A brief exchange of fire on the outskirts of Srinagar city. Three suspected militants arrested among them one is injured. Arms and ammunition recovered. Investigations started."
A brief exchange of fire on the outskirts of Srinagar city. Three suspected militants arrested among them one is injured.Arms and ammunition recovered. Investigations started. pic.twitter.com/lT9AoRnu5H — J&K Police (@JmuKmrPolice) October 29, 2018
The same picture was carried by local news reports as well.
The reports said a "suspicious" vehicle heading towards Srinagar was intercepted by police, and grenades and ammunition found concealed beneath apple boxes. Three militants were arrested after a brief shootout.
A similar claim went viral in 2018 as well, and "BoomLive" had debunked it then.
Therefore, it is clear that no Congress leader has been arrested in Assam recently on charges of hiding explosives and plotting an attack on Hindus. The images used with the viral claim are over two years old and from Bangladesh and Kashmir.
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