A 14-second-long video clip of a youth speaking to the camera while a bleeding woman lies on a bed with her throat slit is viral on social media. In the clip, the youth says that he slit her throat because she was unfaithful to him.
On Twitter, one Sudhir Verma shared the clip with a caption in Hindi can be translated as, “The VDO of the Jihadi youth who slit the girl’s throat in Jabalpur’s Mekhla resort is going viral! After slitting her throat he asked her not to commit infidelity. This is a lesson for those Hindu girls who go away from their society by trusting jihadis, moved by their sweet promises. Be careful, be alert…”
The caption suggests that the accused is a Muslim and this was a case of ‘love jihad’, a conspiracy theory according to which Muslim men trap Hindu women for conversion to Islam.
Another Twitter user, Alok Tiwari, shared the video on Twitter with identical captions. The video received more than 1000 retweets.
Another user by the name Dr S.G shared the video along with a newspaper cutting in which the name ‘Salman’ has been highlighted with a pen. The paper says when the woman ran away with her lover and came to Jabalpur, she realized she had landed in the hands of people running prostitution rackets. These people were being paid by a person named Salman. It is not clarified in the article whether Salman was the name of the lover or the head of the ring.
The clip has been shared multiple times on both Twitter and Facebook.
Fact-Check
We started with a Google search using relevant keywords and came across various news reports. On November 11, The New Indian Express published a syndicated ANI report about the murder. As per the report, the accused had booked a room on November 6 at Mekhla resort in Jabalpur and had stayed alone for the night. On November 7, a woman came to meet him at the resort in the afternoon and they ordered something to eat. After an hour or so, the suspect left the hotel and on November 8 the hotel staff found the body of the victim lying in a pool of blood.
The report also mentions that the youth posted a second video on the deceased’s Instagram account on November 11 where he confessed to the crime. Alt News found the clip on YouTube posted by News18 Virals.
In this clip, the suspect identifies himself as Abhijeet Patidar. He says, “My name is Abhijeet Patidar, I have an oil and sugar business in Patna named Shriram Traders. Jitendra and I are business partners and are residents of Galgala road.” He adds that they both had an ‘affair’ with the deceased, Shilpa, and she was blackmailing and demanding money from his business partner. He then says that at the behest of his partner he killed Shilpa and is now being framed for the murder, they both have equal hands in the crime.
Alt News spoke with Tilwara police station Town Inspector SL Jhariya who clarified that the claim made in the newspaper clipping viral on Twitter, that a prostitution racket was involved, was baseless.
On November 19, NDTV reported that the accused was arrested from Rajasthan. The accused, who had initially presented himself as Abhijit Patidar from Bihar, was identified as Hemant Bhadane, 29, from Maharashtra. The report also says that he had travelled around 4,000 kilometres over the last ten days, changing his location every 12 hours.
अब पता लगा ये अभिजीत पाटीदार नहीं,महाराष्ट्र का हेमंत भडाणे है,दस दिन पहले जबलपुर में 25 साल की महिला की बेरहमी से हत्या के बाद ऑनलाइन अवतरित हो रहा था, दस दिन बाद राजस्थान से पकड़ा गया कोर्ट में वकीलों ने थप्पड़ जड़ दिये! pic.twitter.com/hEC5Ub6XeF
— Anurag Dwary (@Anurag_Dwary) November 19, 2022
India Today reported that the accused took the victim’s debit card and had withdrawn around Rs 1,52,000 from ATMs in different cities. He travelled to Raipur, Nagpur, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh and Ajmer. It was when he withdrew money from an ATM in Ajmer that police were able to trace his location.
To sum it up, the alleged murder of a young woman was given a communal spin on social media based on a newspaper clipping which turned out to be untrue. Alt News has debunked several such instances in the past where criminal acts were given a communal spin on social media.
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