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| - Fact Check: Photos, videos of unrelated incidents passed off as Bihari migrants attacked in Tamil Nadu
Even after the state government and Tamil Nadu police swung into action, the misinformation around "attacks on migrant workers" doesn't seem to die down. Here, we are going to debunk a few such claims making the rounds on the internet.
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India Today Fact Check
The man in this video is Prateek, a pre-university student who was killed during a brawl over car parking at a sports tournament in Karnataka’s Bengaluru. He was not a migrant worker from Bihar.
For the past few days, social media have been witnessing a huge surge in posts about migrants from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh being under attack in Tamil Nadu.
To assuage the concerns of migrant workers, Tamil Nadu Director General of Police (DGP) Sylendra Babu warned that stringent action will be initiated against those involved in causing fear-mongering and sharing misinformation. The state police booked OpIndia Chief Executive Rahul Roushan and its Editor-in-Chief Nupur J Sharma for allegedly spreading misinformation on its portal.
Bharatiya Janata Party's Tamil Nadu chief K Annamalai, BJP spokesperson Prashant Umrao and an unnamed editor of the Dainik Bhaskar were also booked for sharing "false messages" on migrants being allegedly attacked in Tamil Nadu. Nonetheless, these troubling and misleading posts continue to proliferate and create panic.
In this article, we will debunk a few such claims going viral on social media.
Post 1: Video of a man lying in a pool of blood
The first post includes a video featuring a young man with blood all over his body. Lying on the ground, the man can be seen gasping for breath. Some social media users, while sharing the video, claimed that it shows a migrant worker from Bihar being attacked in Tamil Nadu.
Listening to the video, we noticed people in the background speaking in Kannada. To learn more details, we then shared the clip with a few journalists in Bengaluru who confirmed to us that it is from a recent incident in Doddabelavangala of Bengaluru where two boys were murdered over car parking.
Multiple media organisations reported this incident on February 18. As per these reports, Bharath Kumar, an engineering graduate, and Prateek, a pre-university student, were stabbed to death during a brawl over car parking at a sports tournament at Bengaluru’s Doddabelavangala on February 17.
However, none of these media reports used the viral video. To get to the bottom of it, we reached out to Harish M.N, Inspector of Doddabelavangala. Harish confirmed to us that the video is from Doddabelavangala.
Speaking to us, the Inspector clarified, “The boy seen in the video is Prateek who was killed during a fight in Doddabelavangala on February 17. Both the accused and victims involved in this case were from Karnataka.”
Post 2: Photos of two injured men
The second post that we are going to debunk carries a collage of two photos. The first photo is of a man in a blue shirt, trying to wrap his bleeding head with a piece of cloth. The second photo features a man in a pink shirt, lying down in a pool of blood. Sharing collage, the posts claimed it is from Tamil Nadu and show Tamilians assaulting Bihari migrants for speaking in Hindi.
With the help of a reverse search, we found the same and other similar photos of the two men in multiple media reports. The reports identified the man in the blue shirt as Manoj and the one in a pink shirt as Gokul. The latter was one of the accused involved in the murder of a 22-year-old youth near Saravanampatti in Coimbatore in December 2021.
Reportedly, the two had arrived at the Coimbatore district court for the hearing of a case when a gang of unidentified men attacked them with machetes. Gokul suffered a cut on his neck and died on the spot. Manoj somehow managed to escape with injuries and was later admitted to the hospital. None of the reports mentioned the men being migrant workers.
We then contacted V Balakrishnan, Coimbatore City Police Commissioner, for better clarity on the matter. Speaking to India Today's fact-check team, the Commissioner said, “Both Gokul and Manoj were locals from Coimbatore. They were not migrant workers as claimed in the social media posts. The incident resulted from a previous enmity between the two groups.”
India Today’s Coimbatore bureau also confirmed that the two men were from Kavundampalayam in Coimbatore and studied together in school.
Thus, visuals and graphics of old and unrelated incidents are being shared with false claims to instil fear in migrant workers living in Tamil Nadu.
(With inputs from Sudhakar in Coimbatore)
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