Claim of torture of Jubo Mohila League leader in Mirpur is false, verification finds AI used in photo

A claim spread on Facebook and X, using a photo showing injury marks on a woman's back, that a Jubo Mohila League leader was tortured after attackers entered her home in Mirpur, Dhaka. The same campaign was run from more than fifty accounts.

In posts spread throughout Friday (6 November), it was said that the woman had gone to the police station to file a complaint, and the posts also included a description of her conversation with the officer-in-charge (OC). But the posts did not mention when the incident supposedly happened.

Verification found evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the photo. Police said no such complaint had come to them. No existence of the identity used has been found so far either.

Three people who posted the photo were contacted. All three were asked for a way to contact the woman said to have been tortured, her address, and a copy of the complaint filed at the police station. None of them could provide any of it. In the end, they said they had copied someone else's post onto their own accounts and did not know the details of the incident.

In the Facebook and X posts, a photo of a person's back was used to say her name was 'Sreemoyee Rita Rani'. She was introduced as an 'organiser' of the Mirpur Thana Jubo Mohila League. It was claimed that because she is Hindu, does Awami League politics and is beautiful, attackers entered her home and subjected her to 'brutal torture', leaving her body bloodied from the beating.

Some posts blamed a man named Firoz for the torture. But the descriptions of his identity in the posts do not match. In some places it was said Firoz entered the woman's home on the instruction of the convener of the Mirpur Thana Swechchhasebak Dal. Elsewhere, Firoz himself was described as the thana committee convener and the torture was said to have taken place under his leadership.

The posters further claimed that when the woman went to Mirpur Police Station to complain, the OC told her that her beauty was her 'curse' and also advised her to wear a burqa. Raising these allegations, the posts questioned the protection of minority communities, the safety of women and children, and the role of feminists.

More than fifty posts on the subject were verified. Among them, the photo was first posted at 11:59 am on Friday from a Facebook account named 'F K Joy Joy'. Later, two more Facebook profiles named 'Mukul Ahmed' and 'Sumon Mollik' also posted the photo with the same claim. Reviewing the profiles' earlier posts showed they regularly post in favour of the Awami League, whose activities are banned.

At 4:48 pm, S M Zakir Hossain, former general secretary of the banned Chhatra League, posted the photo on his own Facebook page. By 8 pm, his post had received about four thousand reactions. The photo was also spread with the same claim from multiple accounts on X. Among them, a post from an account named 'Dr Baidyanath Ghosh' had been viewed 148,000 times by 9 pm, when the report was written.

Three tools were used to verify the photo — SynthID, OpenAI's AI-generated content verification tool, and Hive Moderation. The verification found evidence of AI use in creating the photo. However, the results did not make clear whether the whole photo was created with AI or whether an earlier photo was edited with AI.

Tracing the source of the photo led to several online posts from about a month earlier. In those posts, a photo had been attached to an incident in Kerala, India, in which a newly married woman was tortured by her husband over dowry demands. The photo spread with the Mirpur torture claim bears some resemblance to that photo. But whether the later photo was made by editing the photo spread with the Kerala incident could not be fully confirmed.

Inconsistencies were also found in the woman's party identity in the online campaign. She was introduced as an 'organiser' of the Mirpur Thana Jubo Mohila League. Multiple sources in the Jubo Mohila League said the organisation has no post called 'organiser'.

Mirpur Police Station OC Md. Hafizur Rahman said in the evening that no such incident had happened in his station area and no woman had come to the station with such a complaint. Hasan Mohammad Naser Rikabdar, deputy commissioner of the Mirpur Division of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, said no such incident had happened in any station area under his division, and no one had come to any station in the Mirpur Division to file a case or complaint in that name or on behalf of such a woman.

Firoz Ahmed, former president of the Mirpur Thana Swechchhasebak Dal, said about the allegations in the posts that he knows nothing about any such matter and does not know the woman. He said he had not even heard that anyone by that name lives in the area and does Jubo Mohila League politics, and no one could say so either, while many police officials and intelligence agency people had also phoned him. Firoz Ahmed added that his identity had been given differently in different places, that it was a completely baseless story spread on Facebook, entirely false and fabricated, and that he too wants the real facts to be uncovered.