The submit surfaced as Bangladesh grappled with extreme floods which have killed at the least 40 individuals and left practically 300,000 taking refuge in emergency shelters (archived hyperlink).
The floods got here lower than three weeks after the ouster of former premier Sheikh Hasina, who was compelled to flee by helicopter to India, her authorities’s largest political patron, throughout a student-led rebellion.
She was changed by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who’s heading an interim authorities dealing with the monumental job of charting democratic reforms forward of anticipated new elections.
Asif Mahmud, a pacesetter of the scholar protests that ousted Hasina, and who’s now in Yunus’ caretaker cupboard, accused India of “making a flood” by intentionally releasing water from dams (archived hyperlink).
India’s international ministry rejected the cost, saying its personal catchment space had skilled the “heaviest rains of this yr” in the identical week, and that the stream of water downstream was because of “automated releases” (archived hyperlink).
Floods and landslides left greater than 20 individuals useless within the northeastern Indian state of Tripura throughout the identical interval.
The photograph of the Hindu temple in India has additionally been shared alongside comparable claims on X and Fb.
Misrepresented image
A reverse picture search on Google discovered the photograph is previous. It was flipped horizontally from an image revealed by the English-language newspaper The Hindu on August 24, 2019 (archived hyperlink).
“The Kapil Muni temple on Sagar Island within the Sunderbans, the place a lot of devotees collect yearly throughout the Gangasagar truthful, is dealing with the specter of rising seas and can be submerged within the subsequent few years,” the report learn partly.
Beneath is a screenshot comparability of the circulating photograph (left) and the image revealed by The Hindu (proper) with the matching options highlighted by AFP:
The photograph was additionally revealed by Indian information organisation All the way down to Earth on September 11, 2019 (archived hyperlink ).
The Sundarbans area stretches from the southeastern a part of West Bengal in India to the southern area of Bangladesh (archived hyperlink).
AFP was capable of affirm the placement of the Kapil Muni temple by conducting a search on Google Maps which reveals corresponding road imagery in Sagar Island within the jap Indian state of West Bengal (archived hyperlink).
Beneath is a screenshot comparability of the photograph within the false posts (left) and its Google Maps road view (proper) with options highlighted by AFP:
