Odisha Police Warns Of Severe Action After Tweets Give Communal Spin To Train Accident

Bhubaneswar: The Odisha Police has warned of severe legal action against those trying to give a “communal colour” to June 2 triple train accident in Odisha’s Balasore district, which claimed 275 lives.

“It has come to notice that some social media handles are mischievously giving communal colour to the tragic train accident at Balasore. This is highly unfortunate. Investigation by the GRP, Odisha into the cause and all other aspects of the accident is going on,” it tweeted.

People have been urged to desist from spreading “false and ill-motivated posts”, it added.

A Twitter user named The Random Indian (@randomsena) had shared an aerial view of the accident site with an arrow directed towards a white building, which it presumed to be a mosque. The user captioned it as ‘Just Saying Yesterday Was Friday’.

This particular tweet was part of a thread wherein the user tried to establish that the train accident was a planned attack by Muslims while the Railways attributed the derailment to an error in the electronic signalling system that led Coromandel Express to wrongly change tracks and crash into a freight train.

Several other users tweeted the same image.

A journalist at the spot later told Alt News that the structure near the accident was the Bahanaga ISKCON temple and not a mosque. Fact-checking website, BOOM FactCheck, also confirmed the same after examining several pictures of the site.

Another user tweeted that the devastating train accident on auspicious Friday, when special observance are practised for Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswari and Kali, is a very bad omen for the Prime Minister.