A post is doing rounds on social media claiming that fugitive diamantaire Nirav Modi in his statement given to the London Court has said that he did not flee India, instead he escaped from India with the help of BJP leaders who benefited from it.
The post says, “I did not flee from India, I was expelled. My share of Rs 13,000 crore is 32%, the rest is taken by BJP leaders. — Nirav Modi in London court.”
The link to the post can be seen here.
Many similar posts can be seen here, here and here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile did a fact-check and found the claim to be fake.
On searching with the keyword, “Nirav Modi, London”, we found many media reports of Nirav Modi being arrested in London.
On April 24, 2021, Hindustan Times reported that Nirav Modi was arrested in Central London on April 20, 2021, and was produced in the Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where the Court refused him bail. The Metropolitan Police said that Nirav Modi was arrested on behalf of the Indian authorities in Holborn. He later appeared in custody at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
A similar report was published by The Times Of India and LiveMint also reported about it.
LiveMint reported that the judge of the Westminster Magistrates’ Court rejected each of the grounds laid out by Nirav Modi’s defence counsel against extradition. But none of the media organisations mentioned that Nirav Modi had said that he escaped India with the help of BJP leaders.
On further searches, we found that most of the posts shared the screenshot of a Tweet done by a user Aditi Munshi. We found on Trendsmap that Aditi Munshi had tweeted the viral claim on June 3, 2021, and has now deleted the post.
Hence we can evidently conclude that no such statement was made by Nirav Modi.
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