A set of two images showing unrelated incidents of fire engulfing a factory and a warehouse is viral with false claims that it shows the recent violence in Tripura's Panisagar area.
The images have been doing the rounds in the middle of reports of sporadic violence in parts of North Tripura; the violence was triggered by communal riots that broke out in neighbouring Bangladesh during Durga Puja. According to media reports, shops were vandalised and set on fire at Panisagar sub-division in North Tripura on October 26, during a Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) rally. The police said that the gutted shops and ransacked houses belong to minority community members and a case is being registered based on a complaint from one of them.
The photos are captioned in Hindi as, "Amir Hussain's electric goods shop and Amiluddin's paint and grocery shop were torched in Rowa Panisagar, Tripura. Both have suffered a loss of Rs 12-15 lakh. All these incidents happened allegedly in the presence of the police. No one has been arrested yet."
(Original Text in Hindi: Tripura के रोवा पानीसागर में आमिर हुसैन की इलेक्ट्रिक सामानों की दुकान और आमिलुद्दीन की पेंट व किराना की दुकान को जला दिया गया. दोनों का 12-15 लाख रुपए का नुकसान हुआ है. आरोप है कि यह सब पुलिस की मोजूदगी में हुआ है. अभी तक किसी की गिरफ्तारी नहीं हो सकी है.)
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The same set of photos are being shared on Twitter with a similar caption.
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Also Read: Unrelated Old Images Falsely Viral As Recent Violence In North Tripura
Fact Check
Image 1
BOOM ran a reverse image search on the photograph and found the same viral image on an Inextlive article published on May 11, 2016. The screenshot of the article can be seen below.
According to the report, a cotton warehouse caught fire on May 10, 2016 due to a short-circuit at Naveen Galla Mandi, Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh. The fire was extinguished after three hours. The same incident was reported on Amar Ujala .
Image 2
We ran a reverse image search and found an Amar Ujala article published on July 2, 2019, carrying the same image.
The article reports about a massive fire which broke out at a plastic granule factory in Phase II of Noida Special Economic Zone (NSEZ) on July 1, 2019 . Another factory also caught fire due to the incident. The entire plastic granule factory caught fire while the other factory suffered considerable damage, stated the report.
News 18 Hindi reported about the incident. The video of the incident can be seen on Patrika Noida's YouTube channel.
Also Read: Unrelated Old Images Falsely Viral As Recent Violence In North Tripura