A Pakistani propaganda website ‘Republic of Buzz’ published an article on March 1, 2020, claiming that a Muslim teenage girl named Deeba from Jafrabad area of North-East Delhi was raped by Hindu mobs during the recent anti-Hindu riots in the national capital. This news was widely shared on social media.
The article was titled: ‘Hindu Mobs Gang Raped 13 Year Old Muslim Girl In Jaffrabad Delhi’.
The article claimed that the charged Hindu mob stormed into Deeba’s residential colony, torching homes and rounding up Muslims. It further read that as Deeba tried to escape, members of the mob chased her throughout the streets, and took her to an abandoned cottage nearby.
It writes how the 13-year-old was gang-raped by at-least seven Hindu men who also forced her for oral sex and sodomy. She kept screaming but no one came for the rescue, the report claimed.
This report immediately started going viral on Twitter with many Twitter users sharing the dubious report making similar assertions. Amongst many was Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM member Zuber Memon, who tweeted the report on that day itself.
The spokesperson of Telangana-based political party MBT, Amjed Ullah Khan also shared the news on his Facebook page.
But these claims made by ‘Republic of Buzz’ is completely false and baseless. No Muslim girl was raped by Hindu mobs in Delhi’s Jafrabad.
A Google search with key phrases from the article does not lead to any results. No credible report could be found to substantiate these claims.
In fact, SHO Jafrabad, Satyadev, also clarified that no such incident has been reported in the area. “This is fake news. Had such an incident occurred, it would have come to our attention,” he said.
A reverse-image search on the face-blurred photo in the report leads to the original image (with face visible) posted on a Facebook page called ‘We are all GIRL’s আমরা সবাই মেয়ে’. The page, presumably operating from Bangladesh has several photos of different women in Hijab.
The original image was posted on January 28, 2018.
On shifting through Republic of Buzz’s Facebook page one can see that it is a shoddy website that regularly runs Anti-India and Anti-Hindu propaganda through unverified reports.
The website, in fact, routinely shares such distasteful articles. One of its most popular pieces is ‘77% Hindu women cheat due to small penises of their Hindu partners’.
Earlier this month, India Today had fact-checked one of its article which used pornographic images to concoct a story about rape by Indian soldiers.
The ‘page transparency’ details of the website’s Facebook page reveals that it is managed by six individuals from Pakistan.
Interestingly, the original Twitter handle of republicofbuzz.com was suspended and it now functions under @buzzrepublic. The channel belongs to one Pakistani user Fahad Kahut who describes himself as a ‘filmmaker’ and now runs his handle under the username @KahutFahad. The Facebook page of ‘Republic of Buzz’ also routinely shares his posts. Its YouTube channel is also full of videos spewing hate against India. Most of the reports on the website are centred around the current events in Pakistan.
Further, the Facebook page of the author Alila Chopy Naga, who wrote the report about ‘Muslim girl gang-raped by Hindus’, mentions her as a Naga separatist. Her page also has several unverified and defamatory posts about India and the Indian Army.
Therefore it will be safe to say that the article claiming that a 13-year-old Muslim girl was gang-raped by a Hindu mob in Jafrabad, published by ‘Republic of Buzz’, written by the alleged Naga-separatist, Alila Chopy Naga, is a shoddy attempt to defame the Hindus and is not even close to being true.
