A gory video (here, here, and here) that allegedly shows Hindus being brutally tortured (bodies being burnt on fire) in Bangladesh recently has gone viral on social media. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Viral video shows a recent 2024 incident of two Hindus being burnt in Bangladesh.
Fact: The video shows two model Human corpses being burnt at a Halloween party in China’s ‘Chimelong Ocean Kingdom’ theme park. It has nothing to do with Bangladesh. Further, there are no reports of such an incident in Bangladesh. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a keyword search. However, we did not find any reports to validate the claim.
Further, to learn more about the viral video, we performed a reverse image search that led us to an Instagram post (archive link) from 2018 that contained similar visuals of human bodies being burnt.
As per the post’s location tag, it was shot in Hengqin, Guangdong, China. We found that, on the same day, this Instagram user posted videos and photos from ‘Chimelong Ocean Kingdom,’ which is also located in Hengqin, where the video of two bodies being burnt was shot. In one of those videos, the Instagram user mentioned that the event was held on Halloween 2018.
Taking this as a hint, we performed a keyword search and found videos (here, here, here, here, and here) shot at Chimelong Ocean Kingdom that contained the setup seen in the viral video. In these videos filmed during the Halloween 2018 party, we can see people wearing different scary outfits. We can see them play with the model bodies (Mannequins) seen in the viral video.
Furthermore, we found a Facebook post by a former employee of ‘Chimelong Ocean Kingdom,’ which contained posters (here and here) of this Halloween party from October 2018. This post also contained images whose backdrop and setting look similar to the wooden wall seen in the viral video. This makes it clear that the video was filmed at a 2018 Halloween party in China and does not show a recent event of Hindus being burnt in Bangladesh.
Additionally, we found that the same video was used in the past to propagate fake news about cannibalism in Haiti and also as visuals of Nigerian restaurants roasting human bodies. Several fact-checkers around the world debunked those claims. You can find those fact-checks here, here, and here.
To sum up, an old video of a Halloween party from China is falsely shared as a recent incident of Hindus being burnt in Bangladesh.
