Recently, a video has been circulated on various internet platforms from multiple Indian accounts with the caption, ‘Thanks to CCTV, this illegal Bangladeshi Sheik Nazarul was caught and arrested. They are digging the infrastructure of our country…’. These posts claim that a Bangladeshi named Sheikh Nazarul, residing illegally in India, was stealing a manhole cover and was arrested for it.

See posts circulated on X with this claim here (Archive), here (Archive), and here (Archive).

See a post circulated on Facebook here (Archive).

Fact-Check

An investigation by the Rumor Scanner team found that the person in the circulated video is not a citizen of Bangladesh. In reality, the video of an Indian citizen named Amarjit Kamati, accused of theft, has been circulated with this claim.

Upon investigation, a similar video was found on the Facebook page of the Indian media outlet Times Now, published on August 29.

The caption of the video states that the incident took place in the Aram Nagar area of Andheri West in Mumbai, India. However, no information regarding the identity of the person removing the manhole cover or the auto-rickshaw driver was mentioned in the post.

Further investigation led to the discovery of a First Information Report (FIR) filed at the Versova police station in Mumbai on August 28, found on the Mumbai Police website.

This FIR was filed by BMC engineer Vicky Shyamlal Sharma. In the FIR, he stated that while inspecting road work, he noticed that five municipally-owned manhole covers had been removed near JP Road in Andheri West.

Regarding this incident, Deepshikha Ware, Senior Police Inspector of Mumbai’s Versova police station, told the Indian fact-checking organization Newschecker that a person named Amarjit Kamati was arrested on August 29. She further informed that Amarjit Kamati is a local resident of Mumbai and not a Bangladeshi.

Therefore, a video of an Indian citizen has been circulated with the claim that it shows an illegal Bangladeshi citizen stealing a manhole cover in India; which is false.