A media outlet slammed Tarak Fatah, a Canadian writer and secularist, for posting a video on his Twitter account claiming that a man after getting angry over seeing girls cycling in front of their homes without hijab hit one of 9-year-old very hard on her head.
The video, which was posted by Fatah has been borrowed from another Twitter account called JPY_Kurdish, and has been retweeted for 8,000 times at the time of writing.
Alt News came up with claims that there was very little coverage by English news outlets about this issue, adding a website named Liveleaks and a Twitter account, Turkey Deeply, only posted about it. It also stressed that neither of these sources are valid.
Turkey: when a group of small girls who wear no hijab play in public, an adult man becomes so angry that he assaults one of them as warning. pic.twitter.com/uzsfwJKnxf
— ← (@JPY_Kurdish) June 25, 2017
Terming Fatah’s tweet inaccurate, the outlet stated the incident is not named as it happened in February 2017 in a province called Samsun in Turkey.
It claimed referring the press release of chief public prosecutor that the man, who hit the girl very “hard on the back of her head by either a stone or a piece of wood after which she fell down and fainted and the man fled the scene” was mentally disabled by 40 percent.
Alt News further stated that police following a complaint started investigation and recovered a video filmed through a security camera showing a man hitting the girl.
Two months later, in April, the police arrested the same person caught on camera for harassing another woman at a bus-stand. Reportedly, the accused, named Osman C is a construction worker.
After public outrage, the chief public prosecutor of Samsun had to issue a release to clear the situation.
The media outlet slamming Tarek Fatah said, “It would seem that Mr Tarek Fatah has not cared to check the antecedents of the video/story before posting it on his Twitter account”.
