Old video of suicide bomber in Syria shared in India with anti-Muslim spin

A video of a scuffle between a group of people followed by a sudden explosion is being shared on social media. The accompanying message reads, “Offspring of an Ashantidoot”. ‘Shantidoot’ is a pejorative term used online to refer to the Muslim community.

A user named Sujit Singh Gehlot tweeted this video, which garnered over 3,000 views as of this writing. (Archive link)

क्या मानव बम देखा है कभी?? शायद नहीं, तो अधर्म की शिक्षा पाए अशान्तिदूत की औलाद समाज के दुश्मन आतंकी को देखिए।पकडने की कोशिश की गयी तो .. pic.twitter.com/l1bwEMd6ML

— Sujeet Singh Gahlot Kanpur💯%FB (@GahlotKanpur) September 29, 2021

The video is widespread on Twitter.

Fact-check

Alt News performed a reverse image search of the video frames, which led us to an article by Altaj News dated September 23. The article also contained the viral clip. It stated that the incident occurred in Tartus, a city in Syria.

According to a Sky News Arabia report from September 23, a man detonated a bomb outside the gates of the Justice Palace in Tartus due to a family dispute. The people involved in the scuffle included a group that got into an argument with a lawyer. The lawyer’s brother-in-law, who had brought the bomb, unlocked the safety valve of the hand grenade during the row and set it off. Both he and the lawyer were killed in the blast. MSN Arabia also republished the Sky News Arabia article.

سوريا.. بيان رسمي بشأن تفجير “محكمة طرطوس” https://t.co/U5dPb5z0jO

— MSN Arabia (@MSNArabia) September 23, 2021

BBC, reporting on the incident on September 24, said that three people had been killed in the bombing.

To sum it up, a man detonated a hand grenade amid a family dispute in Syria. A video of the incident was shared on Indian social media with a communal angle.