A video of Jatrabari police station in Dhaka, Bangladesh, set ablaze by protesters after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled the country on August 5, is being shared on social media with the false claim that it shows an arson attack on a building with Hindu residents.
The video shows zoomed out visuals of crowds gathered on two lanes of a highway looking at smoke bellowing from a building nearby.
Bangladesh descended into chaos following a deadly crackdown on protests against the quota movement, forcing Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of the Awami League to resign and flee from the country on August 5, 2024. Following her escape, several ruling party leaders of the Awami League have been attacked, including attacks on houses and businesses belonging to the Hindu minority in at least 27 districts, The Daily Star reported on August 6.
The video is being shared with the caption when translated from Hindi to English reads, "It was on 5th August when Bangladeshis locked hundreds of Hindus in their homes and set the building on fire. Now how can we allow these ignorant Bangladeshis to live in our India??"
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FACT-CHECK
BOOM found that the incident in the video is from August 5, 2024, when protesters set fire to Jatrabari police station in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The building in the video is not a residence where people from the Hindu community resided as being claimed in the viral post
Since the fall of the Awami League government led by Sheikh Hasina, the police have faced attacks from rioters, resulting in the deaths of several officers during clashes with rioters. The police have been criticised for their brutal crackdown on students during the quota protests and for their perceived alignment with the former Hasina government.
We broke the video into key-frames and ran a reverse image search using Google Lens which results showed a video uploaded on YouTube on August 6, 2024. The caption of the video when translated to English from Bangla reads, "Miscreants set fire and vandalized Jatrabari police station. During this time, the police station building was set on fire and many vehicles including police cars were set on fire. Many police personnel were killed in the attack by the public on the spot. The weapons of the police station were looted."
The visuals in this video match those in the viral video.
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Taking a hint from this we ran a search with the keywords, "Jatrabari police station fire" and found a news report by Bangladeshi news outlet Prothom Alo on the incident. The headline when translated reads, "3 dead bodies in front of Jatrabari police station, police clothes on top, handcuffs"
The report stated that protesters had attacked and vandalised the Jatrabari police station on August 5, 2024, and entered the police station and beat the policemen. It further said that at least seven to eight police cars were burnt in front of the police station and people were seen looting various things from the burnt cars.
According to the report around 13 police stations in the capital Dhaka and 7 police stations outside Dhaka were attacked, vandalised and looted on August 5.
We also found several visuals in this report that match the building that can be seen in the viral video. These photos can be seen below:
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Additionally, we also found several Bangladeshi video news reports on the incident, in these visuals we can see the same building and we can also see the same highway road.
In this Jamuna TV report from August 5, 2024, we can see similar visuals of protesters around the police station.
We were also able to geo-locate the Jatrabari Police station on Google Maps which photos match with the building in the viral video.
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