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 that the September fire killed five students in Sukabumi Regency. Police in Bogor said the fire that occurred in July caused no deaths, while a spokesman for the foundation that runs the school told AFP they were not active in Sukabumi.
“Update: Five students died in the fire,” read the Indonesian-language caption of a Facebook page after on September 18, 2024.
The caption also claimed that the alleged 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 student rooms in a “suspected neo-communist act of terror.”
The accompanying one-minute, 53-second video shows the interior of a burned-out building as people rushed to extinguish the remaining small fires.
The false claim surfaced as the country marked the anniversary of the kill of six army generals in September 1965, with former President Suharto blaming the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and accusing it of attempting a coup.archived link).
This was followed by the massacre of more than half a million people in the Southeast Asian country between October 1965 and March 1966, in a bloody spectacle that heralded the long rule of dictator Suharto, whose fervent anti-communist stance continues decades later.archived link).
The same video was shared on Facebook along with similar claims here, here And here.
In fact, the footage shows the aftermath of a fire at a school in another regency in July, which resulted in no fatalities.
Boarding school fire in July
13 seconds into the video shared in the fake post, a male voice can be heard saying, “Rubath is on fire. These new rooms for students have been destroyed. Thank God no one died.”
Subsequent keyword searches on Google led to a July 5, 2024 report by the Indonesian Police media outlet, Media Cyber Bhayangkaraabout a fire at the Rubath Nurul Fajri Islamic Boarding School in the Caringin district of Bogor, another regency in West Java province (archived link).
The report included photos of the fire scene that matched the photo seen in the falsely distributed video.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the fake messages (left) and a photo published by Media Cyber Bhayangkara (right), with similarities highlighted by AFP:
The report also noted that no one died in the fire, but said it caused “material losses.” She added that police are still investigating the cause of the fire.
Agus Nawawi, a spokesman for the school operator, the Nurul Fajri Foundation, also told AFP that no one was killed in the fire. He added that the school was located in Caringin district in Bogor and not in the district of the same name in Sukabumi.
Further keyword searches revealed that the Indonesian media outlet Pace also published a statement from Rubath Nurul Fajri Boarding School on the fire in a July 8 fact-check on reports misleadingly claiming the fire took place in Sukabumi (archived link).
The school’s statement detailed the damage it suffered in the July fire, including a two-room building with 12 beds and an assortment of student belongings.
It did not mention any deaths and said all students were praying in a hall at the time of the fire.
