| schema:text
| - Misleading: Video showing blood cleanup is not related to Zhuhai car attack
An X user shared a 17-second video on Nov. 12, claiming it shows workers washing away blood on a street in China. “Yesterday, a driver rammed his car into people in Zhuhai, China,” the Chinese-language post said.
“The ground was covered with blood, and relevant personnel were washing the ground,” it continued. The post has been shared more than 500 times and liked more than 2,900 times.
On Nov. 11, at least 35 people were killed in Zhuhai after a man, who police said was upset over his divorce settlement, drove his car into a crowd of people exercising at a sports center in the southern Chinese city.
BBC described the incident as “the deadliest known act of public violence in the country in decades.” The Guardian reported that authorities began censoring any information, including user-uploaded videos, about the incident very quickly.
Hong Kong media outlet Sing Tao Headline published a screenshot of the X video in its report on the Zhuhai car attack on the website and its Instagram account.
The same video also appeared with a similar claim in multiple languages, such as Chinese on YouTube (here and here), in English and Russian on X, and in Korean. The posts racked up more than 7,400 likes in total.
However, this video has nothing to do with the incident that took place in Zhuhai, in Guangdong province. It first circulated online days before the Nov. 11 car attack. In fact, the clip shows the aftermath of a traffic accident in which a cement mixer truck hit a person in Wuhan, in Hubei province.
Accident in Wuhan
A reverse image search on Baidu led us to a Weibo blogger who posted the same video on Nov. 7.
The blogger included an image in the comment section, calling it a “traffic accident.” A cement mixer car is seen in the image of the accident.
Annie Lab searched on Weibo using the keywords “搅拌车车祸” (mixer car accident) and found another post on Nov. 2 describing a traffic accident one day before. The user’s IP address is located in Hubei.
The Weibo post said, “A cement mixer was involved in an accident yesterday morning at the intersection of Jiefang Boulevard and Hong Kong Road. Numerous ambulances and fire rescue trucks were at the scene. The front wheels of the mixer truck were covered with a cloth, blocking bystanders’ view.”
Geolocation
Further image search on Google led to a tweet dated Nov. 1 that shared the same video and two additional clips.
Annie Lab matched some elements and landmarks in the three clips, such as a cement mixer truck and black bollards on the sidewalk, to confirm they depict the same incident and location.
We then searched the streets on Baidu Maps based on the clue from the Nov. 2 Weibo post. Baidu Maps’ street view images of Hong Kong Road and Jiefang Boulevard’s intersection, taken in 2022, indeed correspond with some features seen in the videos.
For instance, the video shows a pizza shop, “尊宝比萨,” also known as the Champion Pizza, across the intersection. We found the same Champion Pizza store on Baidu Maps.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)