Fact Check: Viral post about bombing in a mosque in France is fake

New Delhi (Vishvas News): Since the cartoon case of Prophet Muhammad in France last year, news related to France often goes viral on social media. Regarding the same, a post is going viral, in which it is being claimed about France that bombs were recovered from a mosque in France and the government blew up the mosque with the same bomb. When Vishvas News investigated we found the viral post is fake. No such case has been reported in France.

Claim

Uploading the viral post, a Facebook user wrote, “France’s mosque found bombs and weapons, the government there blew up the same mosque with the same bomb.”

View the archived version of the post here.

Investigation

We started our investigation by searching on Google News search using appropriate keywords. We couldnt find any such news published by any reputed media organization. If any such incident happened in France, it would have made headlines.

Vishvas News contacted three French journalists to confirm the viral post and shared the viral claim with them.

We first contacted Paris-based freelance journalist Catherine Bennett for confirmation and shared the viral post with her. She told us, “I have not seen any such incident here.”

Vishvas News also contacted Alexander Capron, a journalist and fact checker of France 24’s fact checking team Observers, via Twitter and briefed him about the viral post. He told us, “No such news exists here in the media.”

Vishvas News also contacted French 24 journalist Peter Brine for confirmation of the viral post and he too told us that the news was fake.

We scanned the Facebook user Hindu Bunty Ram, who shared the fake post. We found that the user is a resident of Ranchi. This user is followed by 548 people and has 1826 friends on Facebook.