A photo of a young girl is being shared on social media with a caption in Hindi claiming that the photo shows Sonal Patel who was found in Bareilly after getting off a train from Mumbai. The post urges individuals to share the photo across social media platforms. Let’s verify the authenticity of the claim through this article.
Claim: A photo of a missing girl named Sonal Patel found at Bareilly railway station.
Fact: The girl in the photo is not Sonal Patel. The child in the photo is Avani Jain who was lost at Nagpur railway station platform in 2016 when she was traveling with her family from Nagpur to Bhopal. The child was found within 20 minutes after being lost and was safely reunited with her family. The then Indian Railway Minister, Suresh Prabhu, had also tweeted about the child’s reunion with her family. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On a reverse image search on the viral photo, we discovered that it has been circulating on social media since 2018. Further investigation revealed an Indian Express article from 2016 featuring the same photo. According to the article, the girl in the image is Avani Jain, who was travelling with her family from Nagpur to Bhopal when she got separated from them at the Nagpur Railway station platform. However, after a railway official shared the child’s photo which went viral across 200 WhatsApp groups, the family was traced within 20 minutes and were safely reunited.
The then Indian Railway Minister, Suresh Prabhu, had also tweeted to share the news of the child’s reunion with her family.
Incidentally, we also stumbled upon several posts circulating on Facebook featuring photos of different young girls with identical claims to the viral image. The posts can be seen here, here and here. While we could not ascertain the veracity of the first two posts, the last post was debunked by Factly in 2019.
To sum up, a 2016 photo is now being falsely shared as a missing girl named Sonal Patel found at Bareilly railway station.
