Trigger Warning: Graphic Visuals

A video showing a man’s still, lifeless body in a pool of water in the midst of a field is viral on social media. A group of people surrounding the body can be heard saying that his hands were tied.

Users on social media circulating this video have claimed that the deceased was a Hindu man named Sumon living in Bangladesh to insinuate that it was a case of persecution of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh.

X user @pakistan_untold shared the video alleging that the Yunus Mohammed-led Bangladesh government had opened the “floodgates of Hindu persecution”. At the time of this article being written, the post had over 10,000 views and has been reshared almost 900 times. (Archive)

Aanother X user @avroneel80 shared a similar video alleging that student league leader Sumon was targeted and killed by “terrorists”. (Archive)

Verified X user @MithilaWaala also shared the video claiming he was killed by Islamists in Bangladesh. (Archive)

Meanwhile X account @@zamalhossain alleged that the minority Hindu population in Bangladesh is under threat and the country is full of corpses. (Archive)

Fact Check

To understand the truth behind the viral video, we ran a reverse image search on some key frames from the video. This led us to a report by a Bangladesh news outlet Live Narayanganj.

The report said that the body of a man named Nayan Mia was recovered from the Brahmaputra river in Sonargaon upazila of the Narayanganj district on the morning of January 28. Mia was reportedly an autorickshaw driver and resident of the Sonargaon area. The police suspect a snatching gang was behind the killing.

 

We then did keyword search in Bengali and came across other articles by Bangladeshi news portals reporting the murder. Several of these carried the same visuals.

News outlet Jugantor cited Mahbubur Rahman, in-charge of the Baidyerbazar Naval Police Outpost in Sonargaon, saying that Mia left home in an auto in the afternoon of January 27 but did not return home. Police suspect that he may have been killed as robbers tried to seize his battery-powered rickshaw.

To sum up, the deceased in the viral video is of a Muslim rickshaw driver, Nayan Mia, and not of Hindu student leader Sumon. The killing was likely on account of theft and had no communal angle to it.

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