A video showing a young woman’s corpse stuffed in a suitcase is being widely shared across social media platforms with the claim that a Muslim man murdered his Hindu girlfriend and stuffed her body in the suitcase (here, here, and here). In the video, some people are seen questioning a young man sitting next to the suitcase with the woman’s corpse. Through this article, let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video showing the dead body of a Hindu girl in a suitcase killed by her Muslim boyfriend.
Fact: There is no communal angle involved in this incident. The viral video shows an incident that took place in March 2022 at a hotel in the Piran Kaliyar area of Haridwar district in Uttarakhand. According to reports and police, the name of the deceased girl is Ramsha, and the name of the accused is Gulzeb Hussain. Both the accused and the deceased belong to the Muslim community. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Factly previously debunked and fact-checked the same video when it went viral with a similar communal claim in Telugu on social media in 2022 (here).
To verify the viral claim and gather information about the video, we conducted a Google reverse image search using keyframes from the video. This search led us to several news reports (here, here, here, here, & here) published in March 2022, stating that the accused, identified as Gulzeb Hussain, is a resident of Jwalapur in Haridwar district, and the victim is Ramsha, a resident of Manglaur, Haridwar.
According to these reports, the young man and woman had been in a relationship for several years and checked into a hotel in Piran Kaliyar, Roorkee, under fake names on 24 March 2022. After a few hours, the young man came out carrying a suitcase, which he could not lift properly. This looked suspicious to the hotel staff, who called the manager. Upon inspection, they found the girl’s dead body inside the suitcase. The hotel immediately informed the police, who rushed to the spot and took the boy into custody. These reports further stated that Haridwar SP (Rural) Pramendra Doval told the media that the couple had been in a relationship for about eight years and were distant relatives. The girl’s refusal to marry the man led to this murder.
We then visited the official website of the Uttarakhand police and accessed the FIR filed in this incident. According to the FIR, the name of the accused is Gulzeb, and the name of the deceased girl is Ramsha, the daughter of Rashid. In 2022, India Today contacted Dharmendra Rathi, the Piran Kaliyar police station officer, about this incident. He denied any communal angle to the incident, adding that the two were distant relatives and belonged to the same religion. He further stated that the accused boy’s name is Gulzeb Hussain, and the deceased girl’s name is Ramsha.
To sum up, an old video of a woman’s corpse found in a suitcase in Haridwar is being shared with a false communal narrative.
