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| - Fact Check: Horrific photos DO NOT show gang-raped Hindu woman in Assam - they're old and not from India
Assam police have confirmed that no such incident has taken place in the state.
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India Today Fact Check
Assam police have confirmed that no such incident has taken place in the state. The photos being shared are more than ten years old and not from India.
[Content warning: sexual assault/nudity]
Already a pernicious conspiracy theory that plagues social media, it seems that allegations of "Love Jihad" have increased exponentially on websites like Facebook and Twitter following the recently uncovered murder of Shraddha Walkar. Most of these allegations follow the same trope. A Muslim man, a Hindu woman, and grisly murder. And A lot of such posts online present falsehoods. The one ahead is no different.
A set of photos of a woman’s naked corpse stored inside a freezer has been shared by many on social media. Those sharing the photos claimed that Kajal, a woman from Assam, was gang-raped by seven Muslim men. They also claimed that she was stored alive in the freezer and repeatedly raped till she died. The archived versions of similar posts can be seen here, here, and here.
AFWA’s investigation found that these photos are more than a decade old and not from India at all. Assam police have also dismissed the claims made in the posts.
AFWA PROBE
We couldn’t find any media report from Assam substantiating the viral claim. A reverse search of one of the images used in the viral posts led us to a blog post in Portuguese published in March 2010. Per this blog, the images were from a murder that took place in Osasco, a municipality in the S£o Paulo State, Brazil. According to the information provided in this blog, the woman was killed by her partner.
A keyword search in Portuguese led us to multiple media reports from January 2010 regarding the incident. As per these reports, José Lopes da Silva, a 45-year-old man, was arrested on charges of killing his 28-year-old partner Katiana de Souza Moura and placing her body in the freezer in his home.
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According to Brazil’s Secretariat of Public Security, the woman's body was found frozen, in a foetal position, inside the freezer. Some reports also said that the woman was kept inside the freezer for three months. The images of the woman, including the ones used in the viral posts, were also uploaded to the website "Documenting Reality" in August 2010.
We also found that the official Twitter account of the Assam Police had dismissed the viral claims, saying the photos were from "a Portuguese blog of 2010," adding that "Appropriate action will be taken against those found sharing such messages."
So, while we couldn’t independently verify whether the images in circulation are from the murder case in Brazil, we can safely conclude that they are more than a decade old, and were shared alongside a false communally-charged story.
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