Unrelated clips and photos used to falsely claim 'human skulls found at Indonesian Islamic school'
- Published on September 11, 2023 at 12:40
- 5 min read
- By AFP Indonesia
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"Do a Complete Investigation, Discovery of Hundreds of Human Skulls at Al-Zaytun Islamic Boarding School," reads the Indonesian-language caption of this TikTok post, published on August 14, 2023.
The post also contains a two-minute video, which has racked up 16.6 million views.
Text on the clip says: "Terrifying, What Other Secrets Are Behind Al-Zaytun."
The beginning of the video shows a crowd of people panicking, with one woman bursting into tears. It then shows a police officer stepping into a large ditch on the ground.
"It was during their fourth investigation that police were shocked at the discovery of a pile of skulls at Al-Zaytun," the narrator says in Indonesian.
Al-Zaytun, an Islamic boarding school located in Indonesia's West Java province, made headlines when its leader Panji Gumilang was detained by police on suspicions of blasphemy and hate speech on August 2, 2023.
The school has faced backlash from conservative Muslim groups for allowing women to pray in the same row as men and to give a sermon in Friday prayers.
In traditional Islamic teaching, women are expected to pray separately from men and the task of giving sermons in Friday prayers is reserved for men.
The video has racked up 400,000 views after it was shared on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok here and here and on video-sharing app SnackVideo here and here.
However, the claim is false.
Underground tunnel
Scenes of police officers going underground -- seen at the seven-second mark and the 41-second mark of the video -- actually show the discovery of an underground tunnel in Jember regency, in Indonesia's East Java province.
Keyword searches on Google and YouTube found the original video report was published by Indonesian broadcaster Kompas TV on November 4, 2019 (archived link).
According to the report, the underground tunnel was discovered when a man dug a well at an orange orchard in a village in Jember.
Below are screenshot comparisons of the video in the misleading post (left) and the video from Kompas TV (right):
Other local media also reported on the discovery of the tunnel in Jember here and here (archived links here and here).
Crying woman
The first six seconds of the misleading video show a woman crying surrounded by a group of people.
A keyword search on YouTube found it was lifted from a news report published by Kompas TV on July 27, 2022 (archived link).
It is titled: "Mother of Brigadier Yoshua Cries Hysterically at Cemetery Prior to Reautopsy."
It was taken not long after Indonesian police officer Brigadier Nofriansyah Yosua Hutabarat was found dead at the home of his boss, Ferdy Sambo, in July 2022.
In February 2023, a Jakarta court found Sambo, a former two-star police general, guilty of murdering Yosua and sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court commuted his sentence to life imprisonment six months later.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading post (left) and the genuine video from Kompas TV (right):
Teenage boy
At the 1:41 mark, the misleading video shows a photo of a boy wearing a white shirt, described by the narrator as a Malaysian student who disappeared from Al-Zaytun in 2013.
A Google reverse image found that the image appeared in a June 2015 Twitter post by Badruzzaman Harisah, a Muslim cleric and teacher at An Nahdlah, an Islamic boarding school in Makassar, in Indonesia's South Sulawesi province (archived links here, here and here).
Badruzzaman, whose late father Muhammad Harisah founded An Nahdlah, said the photo was taken in the 1990s at the school's mosque (archived link).
He explained that the picture shows -- from left to right -- Nur Maulana, currently a well-known Muslim preacher; Rizal Syarifuddin, then a high school student at An Nahdlah; and Badruzzaman himself, when he was at elementary school (archived links here and here).
"Rizal is now my brother-in-law," Badruzzaman told AFP on September 8, 2023. "He is currently in a room next door. We live at the same house."
Rizal is also a teacher at An Nahdlah and the chairman of the An Nadhlah Islamic Boarding School Alumni Association (archived link).
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the misleading post (left) and the genuine photo (right):
West Java regional police spokesman Ibrahim Tompo told AFP that there is no discovery of human skulls in Al-Zaytun.
"That information is not true and West Java Regional Police have never received any information about that," he said on September 5, 2023.
AFP had previously debunked other false claims about Al-Zaytun here and here.
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