A video of a farmer weeping after his crops were destroyed by fire is circulating with a false communal claim that Muslims have burnt crops grown by Hindus in Bangladesh.
BOOM found that the man in the video is Nasim Miya, a farmer from Kushtia whose harvested crops were burnt by miscreants on December 5, 2024.
Communal tensions have risen in Bangladesh after the arrest of Hindu monk Chinmoy Krishna Das on November 25. The country has now disclosed that 88 incidents of communal violence targeting the minorities, mainly Hindus, were reported since Sheikh Hasina was ousted from Dhaka on August 5. Meanwhile, the interim government's press secretary Shafiqul Alam also said that 70 people have been arrested in connection with the communal violence incidents.
The video is circulating on X with the caption, "Bangladeshi Islamists are pouring petrol on the ripe rice crops of Hindus and setting them on fire."
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Fact Check: Muslim Farmer Misidentifed As Hindu
A reverse image search on the keyframes of the viral video led us to a post uploaded on Facebook on December 6, 2024 which included the viral video. The post was captioned in Bengali as, "Miscreants set fire to paddy fields of a farmer in Kushtia."
In the video the man speaks about how he noticed his field was on fire at dawn and could not save his ripened crops from the flames. He also said that petrol had been used to set his crops on fire.
A keyword search in Bengali led us to the same video uploaded on the YouTube channel of Desh TV, a Bangladesh news outlet, on December 6, 2024.
The man in the video can be heard thanking Allah for granting him good crops this year which have now been destroyed. See here.
Taking a cue from this, we ran another Bengali keyword search and found an article by Channel 24 which included a visual from the viral video. The article stated miscreants burnt rice crops grown in one and a half bighas of land by farmer Nasim Miya in Kushtia. The incident happened at dawn of December 5 in the fields of Laxmipur, Piyarpur Sadar subdistrict.
According to the report, Miya had harvested the paddy a few days before and kept it stacked in four piles on the field. Someone had set fire on all the four piles. Kushtia Model Thana Officer-in-Charge Muhammad Shehabur Rehman Sihab had also assured proper legal action once a complaint is filed.
