Karnataka

Old video of boy placing stones on rail tracks viral with misleading claims

A 5-year-old video of a minor boy being scolded by railway trackmen is being presented as a recently shot video in Karnataka on Twitter.
Screenshots from a video of an underage boy sabotaging train tracks
Screenshots from a video of an underage boy sabotaging train tracks
Written by:
Alt News
Published on: 

A video of a minor boy being scolded by a few railway trackmen is being shared on social media. It is being said that the video was recently shot in Karnataka while some implied that the Muslim community was using children to cause train derailments.

Arun Pudur (@arunpudur), who is subscribed to Twitter Blue, shared the above-mentioned video on June 5 with the caption: “⚠️ Shocking: Another #TrainAccident Averted. An underage boy was caught sabotaging the railway Track this time in #Karnataka. We have tens of thousands of Kms of railway tracks and forget adults now even kids are being used for sabotaging and causing deaths. This is a serious issue. Please look into this @AshwiniVaishnaw @RailMinIndia @RailwaySeva”. The tweet has received over 6 lakh views and has been retweeted over 4,000 times.

User @SubbaRaoTN also shared the same video in a Twitter thread the same day. The first tweet read: “This video is from Karnataka… Such kids are being used by the Jihadis to cause derailment…. #TrainAccident #TrainTragedy”. The tweet has received over 18,000 views and has been retweeted over 300 times. 

After the video went viral on social media some news outlets also picked it up without adding any context to the matter. We came across reports from Times Now, Amar Ujala, Asianet News, One India, Odishatv.in, News Karnataka, Sambad English which covered the matter. Deccan News also tweeted about the video.

Several other users and pages including @enbee007, @maheshyagyasain, @Lawyer_Kalpana, @ZenralBazwa, @ByRakeshSimha and @Goan_Senorita shared the video with similar claims.

Quote-tweeting Rishi Bagree, a user named (@Kesariya_Meenu) wrote: “Horrible. Are these Rohingiyas ,??Before any untoward happens, please pay attention, take action and take this matter seriously who is hatching such a deep conspiracy against the country.”

Fact Check

With the help of InVid software, we broke down the video into multiple key-frames and ran a reverse image search on a few of them. This led us to a Facebook post made on May 12, 2018, it carried the same video that is being circulated on social media now. This suggests that the video is not recent but is at least five-year old.

Further, taking a hint from the viral posts and noticing that the boy and the men in the video were speaking in Kannada, we reached out to circle inspector Ravi Kumar of Raichur Railways to find more details on the matter.

He said, “This video is from 2018. Children from nearby slums were playing near the track by placing stones on it.” He added that the video was being shared with a communal claim but the children had no intention to cause any harm to a train. Trackmen present there scolded the boys and let them off without filing a case, Kumar told Alt News.

Kumar also told us that this incident happened about 2 km away from Kalburgi main station towards Hirenanduru. We also found from him that the trackmen who caught the kids playing were Gopal, Rajkumar and Raju.

We reached out to Gopal and Rajkumar separately. Both of them said the boys involved in the incident were Hindus.

Therefore, it is clear that the viral video is from 2018 and the claims that there is some communal angle to the incident or it was a deliberate act of sabotage are false.

This article has been republished from AltNews with permission. Read the original article here.

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