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  • 2022-10-04 (xsd:date)
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  • AFP photo falsely shared as 'Bangladesh response to cross-border shelling from Myanmar' (en)
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  • After a Rohingya man was killed when mortar shells fired from Myanmar landed across the border in Bangladesh, a photo surfaced in Facebook posts claiming it showed Bangladeshi forces hunting down Myanmar rebel groups in retaliation for his death. However, police and an activist said that law enforcement had not launched any special operation following the killing. The posts share an unrelated photo taken in 2020. Bangladesh security forces are searching for AA members in the refugee camp in retaliation for its mortar shelling in Bangladesh, reads a Burmese-language Facebook post shared on September 18. The Arakan Army (AA) is a Myanmar rebel group that has for years fought a war for autonomy for the ethnic population of Rakhine state, which borders Bangladesh. The group accused the Myanmar military of firing the cross-border mortar shells that killed an 18-year-old Rohingya man and injured at least six more people on September 16 in Cox's Bazar. The Bangladesh border district is inhabited by some one million mostly Muslim Rohingya refugees who live in dozens of camps, after vast numbers fled a crackdown by the military of Buddhist-majority Myanmar in 2017. The Facebook post also calls on Bangladeshi forces to track down members of another Myanmar rebel group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, in refugee camps in Cox's Bazar. A photo superimposed with text from the post shows armed police officers on patrol. Screenshot of the false Facebook post, taken on September 29, 2022 A string of Facebook posts shared the same claim, including here , here , here and here . However, the claim is false. Cox's Bazar police chief Mohammad Mahfuzul Islam said that no special operation was launched after what happened on the border with Myanmar. We do not have any information that Arakan Army members live in Rohingya camps, he added. Human rights activist and Rohingya researcher Rezaur Rahman Lenin also said the claim was baseless. We did not see any special operation by law enforcement agencies targeting any special groups in recent days in the camps in Cox's Bazar, he told AFP on September 28. Unrelated photo Meanwhile, the photo in the posts was taken in October 2020, years before the Rohingya man's death. The picture, taken by AFP photographer Munir Uz Zaman, shows Bangladesh Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) officers patrolling the Jamtoli refugee camp near Cox's Bazar on October 7, 2020, following deadly clashes between rival Rohingya gangs. The photo is available in AFP's archives . The photo shared in a false context on Facebook seen in its original context in AFP's archives (en)
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