An old photograph of a demolition of mosque in Gujarat is viral on social media with false claims that the image shows an incident from Uttar Pradesh.
BOOM found that the image, which shows an excavator breaking the structure of the mosque, is from a 2014 incident of a demolition drive carried out in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
Hindi hashtags have been used in the caption, which translates to, "Yes, now write nice picture. Uttar Pradesh".
Click here to see the post.
The photo is also on Twitter, with a similar narrative. However, the user has not stated where the image is from.
Click here to see an archive of the post.
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Fact Check
BOOM did a reverse image search and found the photo on a tweet uploaded on August 7, 2014. The tweet carried three other photographs of demolition of the mosque with a caption, "Ahmedabad: llegally built Mosque demolished in extended Juhapura Ahmedabad by AMC".
Click here to see an archive the tweet.
All the photographs of the demolition drive include a watermark of "DeshGujarat", an online news portal based in Ahmedabad. The tweet also carried an article of DeshGujarat published on August 7, 2014.
Taking a cue from this, we did a keyword search on Facebook and found the photo was uploaded on DeshGujarat's page on the same date along with the link of the article.
According to the article, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) observed that several illegal structures including warehouses, ice factories and one religious construction were built over AMC's land reserved for waste disposal plant. So, the AMC team decided to demolish the illegal constructions that encroached on the government land.
The report further stated, the AMC teams arrived at Vishala-Narol road in Ahmedabad, Gujarat on August 6, 2014 morning with police force and demolished the mosque including other illegal constructions without any major protest. While the photo has been on the internet since 2014, BOOM however could not independently verify if the image is from Ahmedabad.
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