An old video from 2015 showing a group of children being detained has gone viral with misleading claims suggesting that they were being sent for terror training at a madrasa.
On June 9, 2019, BOOM received a video on its helpline along with a text caption that stated that the police have detained 63 students at Kolkata's Rajabazar area. The caption claimed that the students had admitted to receiving training for terror activities at the madrasa.
It also stated that mainstream media has refused to bring this event to light as they had "orders from above" to ignore it.
The video shows a group of children being escorted by the police.
BOOM searched for the caption in English and found the video shared on social media platforms with the same caption.
BOOM found a discrepancy in the claims being made in the caption. While the Hindi text received on WhatsApp suggest that the children themselves claimed that they were being sent for terror training, the captions on Facebook videos suggested that it was the police who made that claim.
Fact Check
While going through the list of Facebook search results for the caption, BOOM found that the video was shared four years ago, with the same caption.
One of the videos was shared on August 7, 2015, while the other was shared on August 9, 2015.
To investigate further, BOOM did a Google search with the keywords "63 muslim students detained Kolkata" and set the time-filter to show results between August 1, 2015 and August 10, 2015.
The search results led us to three different reports on this issue by the Indian Express, Scroll and DNA, respectively.
According to news reports, on August 2, 2015, Government Railway Police (GRP) at Sealdah railway station in Kolkata detained 63 children along with a madrasa teacher and his wife.
Indian Express reported that the children were from Bihar's Purnea-Kishengunj belt, and were on their way to Pune for training in a madrasa.
According to Scroll and DNA, the GRP stated that the group was intercepted after they allegedly failed to provide proper identity documents.
The report did not mention any suspicions of terror activities raised by the police, neither did it mention the children claiming that they were being sent for terror training.
The articles also mentioned that the detention led to protests from the Muslim community across Kolkata, which lead to a panic on Twitter about a possible 'riot' in the city.
However, Scroll reported that there were no riots in the city.
The reports suggest that the children were sent back to their families in Bihar.