Alo is, once again, lying in its articles about BiH.
On October 3, without any evidence, the Serbian tabloid Alo published an article with the following headline:
There is a sinister plan for Dodik’s gathering in Banjaluka, “lunatics” are ready to do anything, security forces are at the highest level of alertness, HELL AWAITS!
The main claim from this article is that there are currently between 50 to 60 buses parked in Sarajevo, waiting to transport paid protesters to Banja Luka on October 5. The entire theory has evolved around this claim. Unlike similar news, published earlier, in which sources were usually cited as, for instance, “a source close to one embassy in Sarajevo”, this one did not feature any source whatsoever.
Between 50 and 60 buses are currently parked in Sarajevo’s neighbourhoods of Bistrik, Vraca and Hrasno, waiting to depart to Banja Luka on Friday.
The Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order of Republika Srpska found that the buses will be moving via two routes.
The first route will go through Travnik where a small number of buses will pick up passengers in this city, and the other buses will travel through Maglaj and Doboj, where a larger number of passengers is expected to wait for the buses to come.
The Division for Combating Terrorism and Extremism in RS has found that in one home, located in the inter-entity places of Tešanj and Jelah, those who want to go to the Krajina Square on Friday are being paid daily allowances.
The article further mentions the Republika Srpska’s Constitutional Order Protection Service and the RS Anti-Terrorism and Extremism Directorate, although it does specify any other names or evidence that would support the whole story. However, the most interesting part of the article is the one about the “daily allowances”:
The amount the daily allowance depends on people’s “craziness levels,” the more insane the person is, and more willing to do stupid things, the daily allowance is higher.
Moreover, those who will be going with their own cars will be given money for the fuel, the others will be picked up by the buses mentioned above.
This article was first shared by SRNA news agency, after which it was followed by Alternativna Televizija, Radio Televizija of Republika Srpska and websites Argumenti, Princip news and Info Bijeljina.
The team at Raskrinkavanje decided to check the main claim from the article, and the only verifiable one – which is the claim about buses being parked in Sarajevo. As part of our search for the parked buses, we visited all three previously mentioned neighbourhoods, and on this LINK you can watch the full video we posted on our Facebook page yesterday.
However, we did not find any parked bus. All we noticed during the search was a moving GRAS trolleybus and the Centrotrans bus, which was also on the move. For this reason, we rate the article from Alo as fake news and a conspiracy theory.
After the articles have been published by the above-mentioned media outlets, it caused various reactions. For instance, TV1 informed the public about the article published by Alo, and quoted the full article. The same thing was done by a website Source: “Scandalous article from a Belgrade-based magazine Alo: 50 buses from Sarajevo leaving for Banjaluka: The crazier the person, the higher the daily allowance”.
Radio Sarajevo published an article in which the author addressed the entire conspiracy theory regarding the destruction of Republika Srpska. Meanwhile, in the article titled “Look at the buses that will take mercenaries from Sarajevo to Banja Luka”, the website Faktor wrote a critical review of the original article, featuring the photos of Sarajevo streets without any trace of parked buses. The website eTrafika published an analysis of the same article and also added a note related to the appeal of the group known as Pravda za Davida, which kindly asked citizens to be “the conscience of this group and the keepers of law and order” on Friday. Fokus published an article with the following headline: “Vučić’s recipe for winning the election: What’s “cooking” in the house between Jelah and Tešanj?”
This is not the first time that Raskrinkavanje has written about the website Alo and its conspiracy theories related to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the group Pravda za Davida. And it’s certainly not the last one, since today’s cover of the tabloid Alo looks like this:
We’re inviting you to follow Raskrinkavanje, as we will continue to address this topic. We will also publish a new analysis of the above-mentioned front page of Alo, including a broader analysis of the media that talk about the same or similar topics.
(raskrinkavanje.ba)
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