A video of a crowd brutally attacking a man is circulating on WhatsApp as an incident from West Bengal. The clip shows the man lying in a pool of his own blood. One of the fact-check requests we received said that a Muslim mob had thrashed a Hindu man. Since post-poll violence in West Bengal, several videos have been circulated with communal claims.
Alt News is not attaching the video in this report due to its gruesome nature.
Old incident from Bihar’s Muzaffarpur
We performed a reverse image search of stills from the video on Yandex. This led us to an identical match posted on a Russian website. We further found the video posted on Twitter in September 2017.
A report by The Lallantop dated September 21, 2017, said that the video was being shared as an RSS worker brutally murdered in West Bengal. But the clip shows an incident from July 30, 2017, when villagers in Bihar beat to death a man who allegedly killed a deputy chief’s son.
This article cites a Dainik Jagran story. The outlet reported that a man named Ramanuja Shahi allegedly shot Anil Kumar, son of Indradev Mahato, the deputy head of the panchayat of Raghunathpur village in Muzaffarpur, Bihar. Shahi and his partner Ranjit were absconding from the police after murdering Kumar. The villagers caught Ranjit, beat him up and handed him over to the police. Shahi tried to escape by firing his gun in the air but a bullet accidentally hit a minor. Angry villagers lynched him to death.
Hindi daily Hindustan also covered the incident on July 31, 2017.
A video of a man brutally thrashed by a crowd in a Bihar village was shared as post-poll violence in West Bengal.
A slew of such disturbing pictures and videos are being circulated on social media with a West Bengal spin. It is noteworthy that lives have been lost across political parties in West Bengal, but ground reports say that the violence wasn’t communal in nature.
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