Pahalgam attack: 2020 video of child sitting on grandfather’s lifeless body falsely linked to April 22 horror

At least 26 people were killed in the picturesque Baisaran valley near Pahalgam in Anantnag district on April 22 in the deadliest terror attack targetting tourists in Kashmir in recent history. According to survivors’ accounts, three to four men in army fatigues descended from the dense Pine forests around 2 pm and fired indiscriminately at civilians enjoying their time in the lush meadows of what is popularly known as ‘Mini Switzerland’. The Resistance Front (TRF), a shadow group of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack, according to sources in the central agencies.

A video is going viral on social media in this context in which a child is seen sitting on the lifeless body of a person. In the next frame, the same child is seen weeping sitting in a car. In an attempt to pacify the child, some people talk about offering him biscuits and chocolates and taking him to his mother. The clip is being shared as a scene after the Pahalgam attack and it is also being claimed that the grandfather of the child was one of the victims. Some claim it is the child’s father who got killed.

India News UP described the video as that of the Pahalgam terrorist attack and wrote, “The only fault of this child is that he is a Hindu and that is why he lost his father.” ( Archive link )

News18 Rajasthan journalist Premdan Detha and RSS member Vishal Gupta shared the video on X and wrote,  “ In front of an innocent child who had gone to visit Pahalgam in Kashmir, his grandfather was shot dead because he was a Hindu.” ( Archive link-1 , link-2 )

Jitendra Pratap Singh, who amplifies misinformation regularly, shared the video on his X handle and wrote, “The only fault of this child is that he is a Hindu, that is why he lost his father and digital terrorists are laughing at this child and making fun of him too.”

Those who reshared the post of Jitendra Pratap Singh include @We_IndianIN , @LogicLitLatte and  @kreatelyMedia . ( Archive link-1 , link-2 , link-3 )

Fact Check

We performed a reverse image search on some frames of the viral video. We found this video shared on ANI ‘s X handle on July 1, 2020. The post states that Jammu and Kashmir Police rescued a three-year-old child during a terrorist attack in Sopore. The child was sitting next to his dead relative during the attack. ( Archive link )

#WATCH Jammu & Kashmir Police console a 3-year-old child after they rescued him during a terrorist attack in Sopore, take him to his mother. The child was sitting beside his dead relative during the attack. pic.twitter.com/znuGKizACh

— ANI (@ANI) July 1, 2020

Apart from this, we found news reports from NDTV and India Today, according to which, a three-year-old child survived while his grandfather was killed in an attack targetting Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel in Sopore town of Jammu and Kashmir on the morning of 1 July 2020. A CRPF jawan was also martyred in the firing by the terrorists.

Officials narrated to News18 the sequence of events. “During the attack, 60-year-old Bashir Khan’s car came in the line of fire. Khan stopped the car and got out with his grandson to go to a safe place, but he was shot by the terrorists. When CRPF personnel saw the child crying near his grandfather’s body, some of them rushed to save him.”

The first part of the viral video shows the child sitting on the body. This video was shared by a Facebook page named ‘Innocent Kashmir’. While posting this video on 2 July 2020, the user wrote, “A three-year-old child was sitting on the body of his grandfather after he (the latter) was killed by security forces in Kashmir.”

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