On the night of August 22, 2026, in Rangpur, a city in the north of Bangladesh, an ordinary family went to sleep in the home they had built over a lifetime. Ganapati Chakraborty, 65, was a retired teacher from Rangpur Zila School, a man who had spent decades in classrooms and was known to generations of students. His wife, Pritilata Chakraborty, 50, was the quiet strength of the household. Their daughter, Agami Chakraborty Prarthi, 23, stood at the threshold of a new life; relatives later said her marriage was being arranged. Their youngest child, Ayush, was just 12 years old, a Class V student at the same school where his father had taught, still at the age of homework, play, and dreams. In the early hours of that morning, all four of them were killed in their own home, strangled one by one. The horror of the crime is almost beyond words. It is the kind of event that tears a neighborhood apart and leaves a wound in a community. The family should have been thinking about wedding preparations and school examinations, about the ordinary joys of a middle-class home. Instead, the house became a crime scene. But something even more sinister happened in the hours after the killings. Before the police investigation had produced any reliable answers, social media was flooded with claims that this was not a brutal crime but a religious pogrom. The dead were quickly stripped of their names, their ages, their personalities, and turned into symbols. A teacher, a mother, a bride-to-be, and a schoolboy became nothing more than a hashtag. That manipulation is its own crime.
Almost immediately after the murders, social media in Bangladesh and beyond began to burn with a false narrative. A Bangladesh-based X account called Bangladeshi Hindus Community posted on August 23 that “six Muslim men” had entered a Hindu family’s home and brutally killed four members, including an eight-year-old boy whose throat was cut. The account followed up with a series of posts questioning the investigation and repeatedly claiming that “Bangladeshi jihadis-Islamists” were responsible. Another account, Voices of BD Hindus, shared a video filmed at the crematorium and alleged that the family had been killed by “Anti-Hindu Tarique Rahman,” a political leader. The caption spoke of “Hindu genocide” and accused human rights organizations of staying silent. Then, on August 26, an ISKCON monk named Radharamn Das posted a long and emotional message saying he felt deeply depressed, that the “brutal annihilation” of the Chakraborty family was horrifying, and that their only crime was that they were Hindus. He noted that the daughter was due to be married. His post was seen by roughly 140,000 people. These posts were designed to appeal to emotion, not to evidence. They did not mention that the police had not yet released a full account. They did not ask who the attackers actually were. They simply fitted a familiar story of communal persecution, a story that many people were already ready to believe. In a country where religious tensions are real and where minorities often feel vulnerable, such misinformation is not harmless. It can provoke violence, deepen divisions, and destroy the credibility of those who genuinely work for minority rights.
When the facts finally emerged, they dismantled the communal narrative entirely. The police did not arrest six Muslim men. They arrested two people: 23-year-old Siddhartha Das and his 19-year-old cousin, Mugdha Das. Both were residents of the Tut Farm area in Kamal Kachna, Machuapara, in Rangpur city. Bangladesh Police posted the details on Facebook, identifying Siddhartha as the son of Binoy Chandra Das, and Mugdha as the son of the late Kanu Das. This was not a case of mysterious outsiders from another religion attacking a family they had never seen before. Siddhartha ran a fish business at Rangpur City Bazar, and Mugdha worked as a goldsmith. They were young men from the same locality, with families and addresses and ordinary jobs. Their surnames alone should have given pause to anyone spreading the story of six Muslim jihadis. On August 27, Rangpur Metropolitan Police Commissioner Abdul Mabud held a press conference and told reporters that the two cousins had confessed to the murders before the court. The police account of that confession was detailed and deeply disturbing. It did not point to religion or ideology. It pointed to something far more common and far more tragic: drug addiction, panic, and a series of terrible choices that ended in the murder of four innocent people.
According to the police, the night began with drugs. Siddhartha and Mugdha had been using yaba, a highly addictive methamphetamine tablet that is widespread in South Asia. After midnight, they consumed one tablet, then went to the home of a man named Simanta Das and took three more. Around 3 a.m., still craving the drug, they contacted a local dealer and obtained four additional tablets. They had no money, so they reportedly mortgaged their mobile phones to the dealer in order to pay for the drugs. Looking for a private place to consume the tablets, they first went to the terrace of a man named Debu, but they felt too exposed there. Then they noticed the terrace of the Chakraborty residence. It was covered and hidden from view, a more concealed place to take drugs. They climbed onto it and continued using yaba. In total, police said, the two had consumed eight yaba tablets that night, the highest amount they had ever taken. Yaba can cause extreme agitation, paranoia, and panic. It was in this state that Ganapati Chakraborty came to the terrace in the early morning. He found the two men and asked what they were doing there. The pair later confessed that they became frightened. They feared being exposed. In a moment of panic, they grabbed a gamcha, a bathing towel, and strangled the retired teacher to death.
The murders that followed were not the work of people carrying out a mission. They were the work of people trying to cover up a mistake. After Ganapati was killed, his wife Pritilata and daughter Agami came to the terrace looking for him. They were both strangled as well. Agami fought back, and when the towel was not enough, the men found a rope near a pigeon cage and used it to finish the act. Then the accused became worried that the house might have closed-circuit television cameras. They used pliers to cut several electrical wires, disconnecting the power supply in the house. They entered Ganapati’s room, and there they found 12-year-old Ayush awake. The boy had seen Siddhartha’s face and could identify him. He was killed not because of hatred for his religion, but because he was a witness. Police said the child was strangled with a piece of cloth. After the murders, the two men ransacked the house and stole 15,000 taka in cash and gold ornaments, hoping to make the killings look like a robbery. Siddhartha later used 3,500 taka of that stolen money to recover his phone from the drug dealer. Then, in a detail almost impossible to process, the two men took baths, changed their clothes, and stayed inside the house for several hours so they would not attract suspicion. They even smoked another yaba tablet. The post-mortem examination reportedly established strangulation as the cause of death for all four victims. Police also confirmed that the two female victims had not been sexually assaulted. Relatives alleged that the faces of the dead had been burned. An officer from CID Rangpur said police suspected that some flammable liquid had been poured on the bodies before or after the killing, and that the exact substance could only be determined after further investigation.
The truth is no less terrible than the lie. It is not comforting to know that the murderers were not jihadis but two young men from the same city, poisoned by drugs and paralyzed by panic. It is not easier to accept that the victims were not killed as symbols but simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the evidence is clear: there is no communal angle in this murder case. The claim that six Muslim men killed a Hindu family because of their religion is false. The claim that a political leader ordered the killings is false. The claim that this was part of a systematic genocide of Hindus is false. None of this makes the crime less horrific. It remains a brutal massacre of four innocent people, and the accused, if found guilty, must face the full force of the law. But the communal framing is not just inaccurate; it is dangerous. It exploits the grief of a family to spread hatred. It tells Hindus in Bangladesh that their neighbors are waiting to kill them, when the actual evidence shows that the killers and the victims were part of the same community, torn apart by addiction and violence. It also makes life harder for real victims of discrimination, because every false claim makes it easier for those in power to dismiss genuine grievances. The best way to honor Ganapati, Pritilata, Agami, and Ayush is not to turn them into weapons in a political war. It is to remember them as they were: a teacher, a mother, a daughter about to be married, and a boy who had barely begun his life. They deserve justice, not exploitation. They deserve to be mourned as human beings, not used as footnotes in a story of hate.