Video of woman crying after father killed in mob lynching viral as Hindu woman raped by Islamists in B’desh

by Prantik Ali

Trigger Warning: The story mentions details of violence. Readers’ discretion advised.

A video showing a woman sitting on the ground and crying inconsolably as she tries to answer a mob surrounding her is viral on social media, with claims that it shows the plight of a Hindu woman who was allegedly gangraped by ‘Islamists’ in her father’s presence.

Those sharing the clip claimed the incident took place in the Gazipur district of Bangladesh’s Dhaka division. In the video, a group of men, including some police officers, ask her to stand up, but she keeps crying, unable to answer them.

On September 11, X user @HinduVoice_in shared the viral video and claims, also writing that a ‘pogrom’ against Hindus was in effect in Bangladesh. “The girl and her father were going to a relative’s house. On their way, Islamists abducted them. Islamists then tied the father and gang-raped the girl,” the caption read. (Archive)

Another X user, @MeghUpdates, posted the video with the same claim. At the time this article was written, the post had garnered more than 100,000 views, and over 2,000 shares. (Archive)

Readers should note that this user frequently shares misinformation and communal propaganda on X.

The claim was also posted by another X user, @Starboy2079, urging followers to “kick each and every Bangladeshi out of India.” (Archive)

The video was amplified with the same claim by several other users on X. (Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4)

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Fact Check

To check whether the claims were authentic, we watched the viral clip several times. Around the 00:54-minute timestamp, we could hear the woman responding that her father’s name was ‘Ruplal’.

Taking cue from this, we ran a relevant keyword search on Google. This led us to a report by Bangladesh-based news outlet The Daily Star, dated August 11.

According to this report, Ruplal Robidas, a cobbler by profession in his 40s, was on his way home with his relative, Pradip, in a van. On the way, they were accosted by a mob, who accused them of stealing the van. Despite pleading that it belonged to them, the two men were violently attacked and later succumbed to their injuries. The report also mentioned that Ruplal’s daughter, Nupur, was soon to be married. In a tragic twist of fate, Ruplal and Pradip were on their way home after finalizing Nupur’s engagement and fixing the date for the wedding.

Another report by the same outlet, published on August 22, said that the two men were killed on the night of August 9, on their way back from meeting a prospective groom for Ruplal’s daughter, Nupur.

We also came across reports on the incident by Prothom Alo from August 13.

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The report states the two men were lynched on the premises of Burirhat High School in Taraganj, Rangpur, in Bangladesh by 15-20 young men, in the presence of the police, who reportedly did not take action as they were outnumbered. The officer-in-charge (OC) of Taraganj police station, MA Faruq, told the publicaion that there were thousands at the scene and only four police officers. He added that the officers tried to save Ruplal and Pradip but were pushed and punched from behind and stepped back fearing their own safety. “There was nothing more the police could do,” he said.

We also came across a video report on the same incident, uploaded by Bengali news media ‘Jago News’, on August 12. It includes segments from the viral video, around the 1:08-minute mark.

 

Thus, the video circulating on social media has been shared with false claims that it shows a Hindu woman gangraped in the presence of her father. In reality, it shows the daughter of 45-year-old Ruplal Robidas, reacting to her father’s brutal killing at the hands of a mob. Ruplal, along with his relative Pradip Das, was lynched by a mob in the Rangpur zilla of Bangladesh on the night of August 9 over false allegations of theft. It wasn’t clear from the reports whether the incident had a communal angle.

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