Fact Check: Photo of Ukraine railway station goes viral as mosque built by Bangladeshi cricketer Shakib Al Hasan
A photo of a Ukraine railway station went viral on social media as a mosque built by Bangladeshi cricketer Shakib Al Hasan.
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India Today Fact Check
This is not a photo of a mosque. It is of a railway station in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
A photo of a building has gone viral with the claim that this mosque was built by Bangladeshi cricketer Shakib Al Hasan and his wife.
Many on social media shared this photo with claims like: “Bangladeshi cricketer Shakib Al Hasan and his wife built a mosque in their city which cost about 90 lakh rupees. Shakib Al Hasan paid for it out of his pocket. May, Allah fulfil his noble intentions!”
AFWA found that this is not a photo of a mosque. It is a railway station in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
AFWA Probe
While investigating the claim, we first reverse searched the photo and found a similar photo on British stock photography agency Alamy. The website stated this building was the South Railway station in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
We then searched for the railway station on Google Maps. With the help of Street View, we located the building in the picture.
We noted striking similarities between the two buildings.
We then searched for news reports on Al Hasan and the mosque he supposedly helped build. We found Bangladeshi news reports from March 2021 that stated the cricketer had indeed reconstructed a mosque in Magura. The reports stated that the new mosque was much larger than the older one. Al Hasan reportedly spent between INR 20-25 lakh on this endeavour. We checked for photos of the mosque and found it looked nothing like the viral photo.
Thus, we concluded that the claim was misleading. The photo is not of a mosque, but of a railway station in Kharkiv, Ukraine.
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