Unrelated images of burning trains, injured woman shared amidst anti-CAB protests - Alt News
Pooja Chaudhuri
15th December 2019 / 11:34 am
A set of images is circulating on WhatsApp in the wake of the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. The first image shows men in skull cap at a train station. This is followed by images of a train burning and a photograph of an injured woman. The accompanying message reads, “Who are these people??? These are the citizens of India?? What are they doing movement against??? What is cab relationship with them???”
Some of these images are also circulating with a few other photographs on Twitter. A handle Vinita Hindustani (@Being_Vinita) has shared them with the tweet – “बंगाल के मुर्शिदाबाद में हिंदुओ को घर से बाहर निकाल कर मारा जा रहा है 1946 came back again , Because we r puppet (Hindus are being dragged out of their homes and killed in Bengal’s Murshidabad.)” In less than an hour her tweet amassed over 800 retweets.
A similar image of a train burning was found on a May 22, 2018 report by Amar Ujala on the New Delhi-Andhra Pradesh express catching fire.
According to reports, two coaches of the New Delhi-Visakhapatnam AP Express caught fire near Birlanagar station on May 21, 2018, after the air-conditioning unit of a coach threw up a problem, officials said. All passengers had escaped unhurt.
The juxtaposition below makes it evident that the viral image was shot at the same location.
Alt News was unable to confirm the source of this image however it is not recent. A Twitter user had shared it last year.
This image was shared by a user in April last year during the SC/ST Act protests. We were unable to find credible reports that have used the image in the same context. However, it’s existence since at least 2018 suggests that it cannot be representative of an incident that took place during anti-CAB protests.
A reverse-search of the above image does not yield results however a close look shows a poster with the acronym ‘CAB’ which is short for Citizenship Amendment Bill. While we could not ascertain when the image was shot, it does pertain to anti-CAB protests.
Alt News was unable to find any details of the image that shows fire on railway tracks. However, according to reports, protestors in Assam and West Bengal disrupted train movement. The Indian railways, in fact, cancelled 30 long and short distance trains in the northeast, especially Assam. In West Bengal’s Murshidabad, protestors set trains on fire. Railways stations were vandalised in other parts of the district as well.
In conclusion, old images of a train set on fire and a woman wounded have been shared in the context of anti-Citizenship Act protests.
Pooja Chaudhuri is a senior editor at Alt News.
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