Fact Check: Video earlier claimed to be from Russia-Ukraine war now shared as crashing Chinese Boeing
A video of an aeroplane plummeting vertically was circulated on social media with claims that it showed China Eastern Airlines' Boeing 737-800 which crashed. India Today's AFWA team found the claim along with the video to be misleading.
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India Today Fact Check
This video has been on the internet since March 13, 2022, at least. It was earlier shared as a Russian jet shot down by Ukraine forces in Kharkiv.
A China Eastern Airlines' Boeing 737-800 aircraft carrying 132 people crashed on March 21 in South China’s Guangxi region. An official statement on the cause of the accident and the number of dead is still awaited. No survivors were found in the crash at the time of writing this.
Amid this, a video of an aeroplane crashing down vertically was circulated on social media with claims that it showed the ill-fated Chinese plane.
The archived version of the post can be seen here.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found the claim along with the video to be misleading. This is an old video that has also been circulated as from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.
AFWA probe
We ran a reverse image search of the keyframes of the video in question and found the same video uploaded by several social media users at least since March 13, 2022. This confirmed that the video is old and not related to the March 21 plane crash in China. As per these posts, the video shows a Russian jet shot down by Ukraine forces in Kharkiv.
Berlin-based journalist Julian R¶pcke tweeted the same video on March 13 as from the Ukraine-Russia war. He also tweeted a second video saying it showed the two pilots of the jet on their way down on parachutes.
Zwei Piloten an Fallschirmen auf dem Weg nach unten. pic.twitter.com/pbsJJfuMvi — Julian R¶pcke (@JulianRoepcke) March 13, 2022
The same video was also carried by the Daily Express in a report published on March 13.
The report also reiterated that the video showed a two-manned Russian jet being shot down by Ukraine's defence forces.
As per this report, on the same day, Kharkiv's regional governor Oleh Synyehubov through Telegram confirmed that a Russian jet had been shot down in the region. While we couldn’t independently verify the source of the video in question, it is clear that the video is old and not related to the Boeing 737 crash in China.
(With inputs from Sanjana Saxena)
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