Video of staged scene shot on camera viral as real incident of woman pelted with stones in Bangladesh

A video of a saree-clad woman buried in the soil up to her waist as a group of men wearing kurtas and skull caps throw stones at her was viral on social media. In the video, people can be heard speaking in Bengali in the background and social media users claim the footage is from Bangladesh and the woman was being stoned by Islamists as prescribed under the Sharia law. Those sharing the video hinted that this was the state of affairs of the neighbouring country under the administration of Mohammad Yunus.

X user @MrSinha_, whose posts we have fact checked before, shared the video and wrote that Islamists stoned a woman as per Sharia in Bangladesh. While post has now been deleted, we have added the screenshot below. (Archive)

Another X user, @HPhobiaWatch, also shared the viral video with the caption, “A woman is being stoned in Bangladesh. This is the new Bangladesh that the deep state under Biden brought to power.” (Archive)

X user @jpsin1, who has also been fact checked by Alt News several times, shared the video claiming that in Bangladesh, a woman accused of immoral acts was stoned as per Sharia law. (Archived link)

Fact Check

While investigating, Alt News noticed that Shohanur Rahman, a Bangladesh-based journalist from fact-checking organisation Rumour Scanner, had shared longer version of a similar video and a screenshot of the video post in response to some of the viral posts on X. In the screenshot, it’s clear that a user named Shamim Ahmed had shared the longer version of the viral video two years ago. Rahman said a close look at the longer video makes it clear that this was not a real incident, but a staged shoot.

Taking cue from this, we performed a reverse image search using a few frames from the viral video and found the same video uploaded on TikTok on March 16, 2023 by a user named Bijoy Sarkar. At the same time, a user named Ishrat Jahan Sumi also uploaded this video on Facebook on March 25, 2023. Another user named Shamim Ahmed uploaded this video on YouTube on March 19, 2023. This confirms that this video is at least two years old and has been online one-and-a-half years before Mohammad Yunus took over the administration after the coup in Bangladesh.

In the viral video, a voice in the background can also be heard shouting ‘Action’, a cue used during film shoots to establish that the shot is being recorded. In the longer version of this video, it is clear that the woman buried in the ground is surrounded by people from all sides, some of whom have shooting equipment, such as a camera and a monopod. In the video, those standing there get briefed on the scene while one person hands them stones. As soon as the command ‘Action’ is given, the group starts performing dialogues and throwing stones at the woman. It is clear from this that this is not a real incident, but the shooting of a film or dramatised scene.

To sum up, social media users shared the clip of a woman being pelted with stones during a shooting as a real incident and claimed that this was the state of women accused of having an immoral character as per the Sharia law under the Muhammad Yunus-led government in Bangladesh.

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