Bangladesh: Photos of 2012 Cox’s Bazar violence falsely viral as recent attack on Buddhists

by Prantik Ali

A collage of three pictures is viral on social media showing the desecration of idols of the Buddha and some Buddhist monks.

The first of the three pictures (marked 1 in the above collage) shows a man with his back turned towards the camera hitting a statue of the Buddha. The second one (2 above) shows a group of Buddhist monks standing in front of the debris of what can be surmised as a monastery. The third picture (3 in the collage) shows three vandalised idols of the Buddha. This viral collage has surfaced in the wake of several reports of minority communities being targeted in Bangladesh since the fall of the Hasina government.

X user (@bizsahilkumar) tweeted this viral collage, claiming that these were recent images from Bangladesh. At the time of this article being written, the post has managed to accumulate around 1.6 Lakh views and has been re-shared more than 3,500 times. (Archive) 

Similar claims were shared by other X users. (Archives: 1, 2, 3)

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The same collage is also viral on Facebook with similar claims of Buddhists coming under attack in Bangladesh.

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Premium-subscribed X user Jitendra Prasad Singh (@jpsin1) also tweeted the images with a similar claim — that Buddhist monasteries were under attack in Bangladesh from Muslims. The collage of images he posted to support his claim comprised an additional photo that depicted a woman lamenting the vandalism of a Buddha statue. (Archive)

Fact Check 

We ran a reverse image search on picture No 1, which led us to a tweet from July 17, 2020. The photos included in this tweet match those from the viral collage. From this, it is clear that these are not recent photos and have no connection with the recent unrest in Bangladesh. (Archive)

We noticed that the image depicted Buddhist monks looking at the debris of apparently a burnt down monastery, (No 2 in the collage) also came with a caption in this X post. It said, “After burning Buddhist Temple, Ramu, Cox’s Bazar.” We ran a reverse image search on this picture and came across this blog article from 2012. It reports on several communal acts of vandalism on Buddhist temples in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district.

We ran another reverse image search on the picture No 3 in the viral collage, showing three vandalised statues of the Buddha. This led us to a stock image uploaded on iStock, an online repository owned by Getty Images. The picture in question, uploaded by user @Tarzan9280 carried a description which said: “In a small village close to Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, some temples were attacked by some extremist Muslims and the statues of Buddha were destroyed.” We noticed that the vandalised statues from this stock image match those depicted in the recent posts on social media.

Taking a cue from the descriptions of these photographs, we ran a relevant keyword search on Google, which led us to this BBC article from September 30, 2012. It reports on an incident of communal violence in the Ramu sub-division of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, which saw targetted looting and burning of Buddhist homes and temples, in retaliation to a Facebook post allegedly made by a Buddhist youth, that insulted the Quran. A subsequent investigation by Bangladeshi news outlet The Daily Star, however, found that the user’s account might have been hacked to incite the communal violence.

The Hindu also covered this communal flare-up in Bangladesh, reporting that more than 200 houses belonging to the Buddhist minority community were looted and torched, compelling residents to flee their homes and villages.

We also came across another blog article from 2012 that reported on the violence unleashed by Muslim extremists on the Buddhist community in Ramu in Cox’s Bazar on September 29-30. The photo attached in this article also matches with the one marked 1 in the viral collage, showing the Buddha statue being attacked.

Some of the tweets contained a fourth photo:

A reverse search on this image led us to another report in The Daily Star dated October 19, 2012, which carried a photo of the same idol from a monastery in Ramu Upazila in Cox’s Bazar district.

This report, too, talks about “the orchestrated attacks on the Buddhist community” in Cox’s Bazar in September 2012.

To sum up, various pictures depicting the aftermath of attacks on Buddhist settlements and monasteries in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, in 2012 are being re-shared on social media with the claim that they depict recent attacks on monasteries amid the ongoing political unrest in Bangladesh. The attacks took place in 2012 following allegations of a Buddhist youth insulting the Quran in a Facebook post.

Prantik Ali is an intern at Alt News.

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