Digvijaya Singh falls for hoax, tweets pic from Pakistan as that of 'Bhopal rly bridge', apologises

 Congress leader Digvijaya Singh on Sunday apologised for tweeting a picture of a bridge in Pakistan and claiming it to be a railway bridge in Bhopal, days after actor Shabana Azmi did the same over an unverified tweet.

"This is a pillar of an under-construction railway overbridge at Subhash Nagar Railway Gate at Bhopal. The cracks on it raise questions over its quality...I hope what happened in Varanasi doesn't happen here too," Singh had tweeted, along with a photograph of a bridge with a pillar that had developed cracks on it. AltNews, a website that cross-checks information posted on Twitter, pointed out the mistake to Singh, saying it was an old image of a damaged metro pillar in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

The photo of the damaged pillar had been used on the social media multiple times and on each occasion, a different location was mentioned, AltNews said in a tweet. "My apologies. One of my friend sent it to me. My fault I didn't check up (sic)," tweeted Singh, replying to AltNews. On June 4, Azmi too had a similar experience when she shared a video of a group of people washing dishes in muddy water on the microblogging website. Assuming that they were railways staffers, she had tagged Railway Minister Piyush Goyal in the tweet.

The next day, the Indian Railways issued a clarification, stating that the people shown in the video were workers at a Malaysian eatery, after which the actor issued an apology.