On February 4, reports emerged that an eight-year-old girl was murdered in West Bengal’s Kolkata. Upon reaching the crime scene, the police suspected she was raped. Meanwhile, social media users have been sharing a purported photo of the victim and questioning why the people of West Bengal have not protested against her death.
Twitter user Utkarsh Srivastava shared this picture. His post was retweeted by 619 handles at the time of writing. (Archive link)
Congress leader Archana Dalmia tweeted the viral photo alongside a picture of a newspaper clipping about the eight-year-old who was murdered in North Kolkata, after being allegedly raped.
Twitter user Anjali Devi also shared the image with this claim. (Archive link)
The photo is viral on Facebook and Twitter.
Fact-check
Alt News performed a reverse image of the picture and came across an Amar Ujala story dated October 27, 2020. It attributed the image to an incident in Etah, Uttar Pradesh. A 15-year-old molestation survivor died by suicide after jumping from the fourth floor of the hospital. The report mentions that the perpetrator was a tenant in the girl’s house. Even after vacating her home, he would still harass her. Fed up of this, she took her own life.
We then performed a keyword search which led us to ABP Ganga’s story from October 28, 2020. According to this report, the accused was arrested in Etah in the girl’s suicide case. The police found some pictures of the deceased in his possession, which he used to blackmail her. ABP Ganga stated, “The police have charged him in a case of sexual harassment and abetment to suicide.”
A photo of a teenaged girl driven to suicide in October 2020 after being blackmailed was falsely linked to the recent suspected rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Kolkata.
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