Alt News Impact: BJP Asansol IT Incharge Tarun Sengupta arrested for spreading fake video - Alt News
Alt News Desk
12th July 2017 / 2:36 pm
The logo inside the circled region in the screenshot above is that of Alt News. West Bengal police this morning announced the arrest of BJP Asansol IT Cell Secretary Tarun Sengupta who had posted a video on his Facebook timeline and had claimed that Muslim IPS officers were beating up a Hanuman Bhakt on Hanuman Jayanti this year. The video was in fact many years old and has been available on YouTube for the longest time. The arrest has been made on the basis of a Alt News story dated April 23, 2017. In our story, we had exposed Tarun Sengupta and Postcard News, both of whom had published the old video with similar fake stories.
We had also captured Tarun Sengupta’s mischief on a Youtube video and can be seen below.
The aforesaid video however had nothing to do with Hanuman Jayanti which was celebrated on April 11 2017. This video has been available on Youtube for a very long time and following are some of the instances of this video on YouTube along with the dates on which it was uploaded to YouTube.
Posted on September 30, 2014 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoRodq_DN68
Posted on April 7, 2015 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yGAdKz3A2I
Posted on June 27, 2016 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0mEQymlpsU
For spreading communal discord via fake videos, West Bengal Police has now arrested Tarun Sengupta.
Interestingly, when Alt News had first published this story, BJP MP from Asansol, Babul Supriyo, had called this story a fake story and had claimed that no such person called Tarun was the IT incharge in Asansol. He had also said that he will immediately enquire. We didn’t hear of any such enquiry, subsequent apology or retraction from Babul Supriyo. In fact, Tarun Sengupta, while sounding offended, had tweeted stating “Surprisingly U r so near, but unaware 2 me”, thus indicating that he was indeed associated with BJP IT Cell in Asansol.
While Tarun Sengupta has been arrested, the owners of Postcard News are still out there continuing to spread fake news on a regular basis. The article in which they had made the same false claim that Tarun Sengupta had made is still up on their website.
The owner of Postcard News resides in Karnataka but Congress ruled Karnataka has failed to take cognizance of this issue.
Alt News will continue to call out people who spread fake news and fake videos. It is very unfortunate when people have to be arrested, but a civilised democratic society cannot entertain elements who deliberately try to instigate communal hatred between different religions via such nefarious means. Alt News has exposed many such instances of fake videos and hopes that various State Governments will take cognizance of the same and arrest the ones who are responsible for making such misleading videos viral. The only place these elements deserve is the back of a prison cell.
Follow @free_thinker
Following Saudi Arabia’s 2-1 win against Argentina in the ongoing FIFA World Cup, speculation about…
Trigger Warning: The following story contains graphic imagery. Several users have shared images of the…
The brutal murder of Shraddha Walker has been widely covered across news media over the…
A 1:34-minute-long CCTV camera clip is being widely circulated on social media in which viewers…
The teaser of a movie titled ‘The Kerala Story’ is being widely shared on social…