Fact Check: Newspaper clip showing Arvind Kejriwal accused of rape as an IIT student is digitally created
rvind Kejriwal is an Indian politician, who is the current Chief Minister of Delhi. At present, he is under judicial custody. He was arrested on March 21, 2024, in the alleged liquor policy scam. He will be spending the next two weeks in jail after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) custody ended on April 1, 2024.
Claim :
A newspaper clipping shows that Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal was accused of rape when he was an IIT studentFact :
The newspaper report is a hoax, it was created digitally
Arvind Kejriwal is an Indian politician, who is the current Chief Minister of Delhi. At present, he is under judicial custody. He was arrested on March 21, 2024, in the alleged liquor policy scam. He will be spending the next two weeks in jail after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) custody ended on April 1, 2024.
Meanwhile, a newspaper clipping is going viral on social media even as the case is sub-judice. The clip has the heading “IIT student accused of rape”. The article goes on to report about a 19-year-old IIT Kharagpur student, Arvind Kejriwal, being accused of raping a local girl and detained by the police for interrogation. The date of the newspaper clipping can be seen as June 8, 1987.
The claim is going viral on WhatsApp too.
Fact check:
The claim is false. The newspaper clipping has been digitally created.
When we searched for the local editions of the newspaper, The Telegraph or the Telegram, etc., we were unable to find any authentic new reports that published such news.
Upon further research, we found that there are some discrepancies in the article in circulation. There is no name of the reporter or date of the incident. The article clip has been created using a website named ‘Fodey.com’, which is a newspaper clipping generator.
Here is the image of a newspaper clipping generated by Telugupost using the website Fodey.com. When observed carefully, we can see that the third column of the report, which is cut off in every clipping has the same words. This confirms that the newspaper clipping going viral about Arvind Kejriwal is digitally generated and not a genuine news article.
The same claim has been debunked by a few fact-check organizations in the year 2020 also. Hence, the claim is False.
