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| - Fact Check: Not another Houthi attack, this video is from 2021
An old and unrelated video of a cargo ship disaster near the Sri Lankan coast was falsely shared as a Yemeni attack on an American ship.
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India Today Fact Check
This video is from May 2021 and shows the MV X-Press Pearl, a Singapore-registered container ship that caught fire near the Sri Lankan coast.
A video that has been widely shared on social media shows a cargo ship on fire in the middle of the sea, with black smoke billowing from it. Those sharing the video claimed it showed another US ship attacked by the Yemeni extremist group Houthis.
One such post on Facebook was captioned: "Yemen Houthis hit another american ship!"
India Today Fact Check found that the video is from May 2021 and shows a cargo vessel carrying a consignment of chemicals near Sri Lanka that caught fire.
OUR PROBE
A reverse search of keyframes from the viral video led to the same clip, featured in a Chinese news report published on May 27, 2021, making it clear that the video is not related to any recent attack.
According to this report, the video shows the Express Pearl, a container vessel that caught fire near the port of Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. Reportedly, the fire engulfed almost the entire container ship. Crew members, however, were safely evacuated.
Subsequent searches with relevant keywords led us to a Russian news report from May 25, 2021, that noted that a fire was detected on a cargo ship carrying a consignment of chemicals on the same day, after which an explosion occurred, leading to the massive blaze.
It is noteworthy that the Indian Navy sent its three ships — Samudra Prahari, Vaibhav, and Vajrato — to combat the fire. The official press release regarding this deployment can be seen here. Different visuals of the fire were covered in several news reports and Instagram accounts from May 25, 2021.
According to a Hindustan Times report dated May 30, 2021, authorities successfully brought the fire under control. The ship, however, sank a couple of days later during an attempt to tow the vessel to deeper waters.
The fiasco with the MV X-Press Pearl, the Singapore-registered container ship, resulted not only in a monetary loss of millions but also caused long-term environmental damage to the Indian Ocean around the Sri Lankan coast. On November 2023, visuals from this accident were misattributed as a Houthi attack on an Israeli ship. India Today fact-checked it at the time.
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