A video taken after a fire at an Islamic boarding school in Bogor regency in Indonesia’s West Java province has been shared repeatedly alongside a false claim the blaze killed five students in Sukabumi regency in September. Police in Bogor said the fire that took place in July did not cause any deaths, while a spokesperson from the foundation that runs the school told AFP they did not operate in Sukabumi.
“Update: five students died in the fire,” read the Indonesian-language caption of a Facebook post on September 18, 2024.
The caption also claimed the purported fire took place in September at an Islamic boarding school in the Caringin district of Sukabumi regency, located in West Java province south of the capital Jakarta. It said “unknown people threw Molotov cocktails” at students’ rooms in a “suspected neo-communist terror” act.
The accompanying one-minute, 53-second video shows the interior of a burnt out building as people rushed to put out remaining small fires.
The false claim surfaced as the country marked the anniversary of the killing of six army generals in September 1965, which former president Suharto blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and accused the party of attempting a coup (archived link).
This was followed by the massacre of more than half a million people across the Southeast Asian nation between October 1965 and March 1966, in a bloody spectacle that ushered in the long rule of dictator Suharto, whose fervent anti-communist stance remains decades on (archived link).
The same video was shared alongside similar claims on Facebook here, here and here.
In fact, the footage shows the aftermath of a fire at a school in a different regency in July, which did not cause any fatalities.
July boarding school fire
A male voice can be heard at the 13-second mark of the video shared in the false post, saying: “Rubath is on fire. These new rooms for students are destroyed. Thank God no one died.”
Subsequent keyword searches on Google led to a July 5, 2024 report by the Indonesian police’s media outlet, Media Cyber Bhayangkara, about a fire at the Rubath Nurul Fajri Islamic Boarding School in the Caringin district of Bogor, a different regency in West Java province (archived link).
The report featured photos from the scene of the fire that corresponded to the one seen in the falsely circulated video.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and a photo published by Media Cyber Bhayangkara (right), with similarities marked by AFP:
The report also stated that no one died in the fire but said it caused “material losses”. It added that police were still investigating the cause of the fire.
Agus Nawawi, a spokesperson from the school operator, the Nurul Fajri Foundation, also told AFP no one died in the fire. He added that the school was located in Caringin district in Bogor and not the district of the same name in Sukabumi.
Further keyword searches found that Indonesian media outlet Tempo also published a statement from the Rubath Nurul Fajri boarding school about the fire in a July 8 fact check of posts that misleadingly claimed the fire took place in Sukabumi (archived link).
The statement from the school listed the damages it suffered in the July fire, which included a two-room building, 12 beds and an assortment of students’ belongings.
It did not list any deaths and said all the students were praying in a hall at the time of the blaze.
