Fact Check: No, these students were not arrested in Kolkata on their way to terror training

Were a group of children arrested from Muslim-dominated Rajabazar in Kolkata while they were being taken to Pune for terror training? A viral video on social media claims so.

India Today’s Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found the claim to be misleading. The video in question is an old one of students being taken from Bihar’s Purnea and Kishanganj to Pune for studies in a madrasa there.

On May 31, a Facebook page named Kurnool city Page’ posted a video showing some children carrying bags on their shoulders and walking in a line into a spacious location resembling a railway station complex.

The video is accompanied by a text in Hindi, which translates into: Some 63 students were arrested from Rajabazar area in Kolkata and police say they were being moved for terror training.

The post went on to claim that media won’t flash the news following orders from higher authorities. The Facebook page urges readers to urgently forward the post so that people get to know about it. At the time of filing this story, the post received nearly 6,000 views and more than 200 shares.

Here is the archived version of the post.

Many other Facebook users such as Mangalam Saqib and Asad P also shared the video with the same claim.

We found that the video has been doing the rounds on social media with false claims for the last few years.

AFWA has found that it is an old video from 2015. Facebook user Merailaka.com posted the same video on August 8, 2015, debunking the claim.

We also found several newspaper articles, which had reported back in 2015 that 63 children, aged between 6 and 17 years, had been intercepted by the Government Railway Police (GRP) on August 2 while they were boarding a train from Sealdah station without any ID cards and documents.

The Indian Express reported that the children had come from Bihar’s Purnea-Kishangunj belt and were heading to Pune for studies at a madrasa. Quoting Ashokendu Sengupta, chairman of the State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, The Indian Express wrote, The children were sent back to Purnea with police escort and the CWC there had been asked to verify their addresses and claims that they were being taken to Maharashtra for higher studies. We could not take any risk.

Other links of the incident can be checked here and here.