Videos from Gujarat crematorium portrayed as plight of COVID-19 dead bodies in Maharashtra - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
April 26, 2021
Multiple videos are being shared on social media claiming them as visuals of dead bodies waiting outside the crematoriums in Maharashtra. They can be seen here and here. In the wake of a massive surge in the COVID-19 cases across India, these videos are being widely shared on social media. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Visuals of dead bodies waiting for cremation outside the crematoriums in Maharashtra.
Fact: This incident took place recently at a cemetery in Surat, Gujarat. This video shows a long queue of COVID-19 victims’ dead bodies awaiting cremation at Umra crematorium in Surat. This video has nothing to do with Maharashtra. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Video-1:
On reverse image search of the screenshots in the video, a video with similar visuals is found published on ‘Nation Next’ YouTube channel on 10 April 2021. The description of the video states, ‘Video of dead bodies lined up for cremation in Surat grim reminder of Covid-19 reality | Gujarat’. The man in the video could be heard saying in Gujarati, “This is the current situation in Gujarat. Hospitals are providing tokens to people so that they can claim their loved one’s dead bodies”.
When we searched for further details using these keywords, we found news articles published about dead bodies awaiting cremation in Surat. They can be seen here and here. These articles reported that a long queue of COVID-19 victims’ dead bodies waited hours for cremation at Umra crematorium in Surat.
Video-2:
On reverse image search of the screenshots in the video, a similar visual of people in queues for the dead bodies cremation was found in an article published by ‘The Daily Guardian news website’. This article reported it as the visuals from a crematorium in Gujarat. Though we could not ascertain the exact location of the crematorium, it can be concluded that this video is from Gujarat, not Maharashtra.
To sum it up, videos related to the Gujarat crematorium are portrayed as the visuals of dead bodies awaiting cremation in Maharashtra.