Clip of Mob Vandalising Temple in Pakistan Shared as West Bengal

The clip is of an incident in Pakistan's Punjab where a mob vandalised a Hindu temple on 4 August.

The video is actually from Pakistan and does not show Rohingya Muslims in West Bengal.

(Photo: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

A video of a mob vandalising a Hindu temple in Pakistan is being shared on social media, falsely claiming that it shows Rohingya Muslims destroying a temple close to their settlement in West Bengal.

The incident took place on 4 August, in Rahim Yar Khan district in Pakistan's Punjab, where a mob attacked and burnt the Bhong Sharif Mandir after a minor Hindu boy was granted bail for desecrating a Muslim seminary.

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan took to Twitter to 'strongly condemn' the attack the next day and said that the government would restore the destroyed Mandir.

CLAIM

The video is being shared with a Hindi claim, which reads "रोहिंग्या मुस्लिम समुदाय की बस्ती के नजदीक का हिंदू मंदिर ,पश्चिम बंगाल".

(Translation: A Hindu temple near a Rohingya Muslim settlement in West Bengal, India.)

An archived version of this post can be seen here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

More such claims made along with the same video can be seen here and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

Using InVID, Chrome's video verification tool, we divided the video into keyframes and ran reverse image search on them. This led us to news reports of the incident, including The Quint, which carried screenshots of the video.

The report carried visuals from the video being shared.

(Photo: Scroll/Screenshot)

A mob in Bhong city in Rahim Yar Khan district in Punjab, Pakistan attacked and vandalised a Hindu temple on 4 August, after a minor Hindu boy was given bail for desecrating a Muslim seminary.

A report by The Hindu stated that police had been deployed in the area, where around 100 Hindu families live, to avoid any further conflict.

We also came across a video tweet by parliamentarian and member of the Pakistan Hindu council Dr Ramesh Vankwani dated 4 August, where he said the situation was 'tense' and called the police's negligence 'shameful'.

As of 9 August, 50 of the 150 accused in the temple vandalism case have been arrested, as per India Today's report.

The province's Chief Minister Usman Buzdar said that it was the state's responsibility to protect places of worship of all religions in Pakistan and that the temple's restoration work was in 'full swing'.

Clearly, the video does not show a mob of Rohingya Muslim people vandalising a Hindu temple near their settlement and is not from West Bengal.

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