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| - Fact Check: 2019 mock drill from Kuwait FALSELY shared as Saudi minister getting spooked by firecrackers
A video showing a mock drill in Kuwait is falsely shared as the Saudi Arabian Minister of Defence getting spooked by firecrackers.
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India Today Fact Check
This video shows a mock drill in Kuwait, conducted during the fifth Gulf Defence and Aerospace Exhibition in December 2019.
A man donning a white headscarf, escorted by a bunch of uniformed guards, steps out of an SUV. As the man walks towards a crowd outside a building, chaos erupts. Some of the guards catch hold of a man. The other guards rush the headscarf-wearing person back into the car and drive away. All the while, a series of bangs are heard.
Those sharing this chaotic video claimed the man being escorted was the Saudi Arabian defence minister. They alleged that when he visited the Chinese Embassy on the occasion of the Chinese New Year, the sound of fireworks startled him and his guards, leading to what we see in the video.
The archived versions of similar posts can be seen here and here.
AFWA found that no part of this claim was factual. The video shows a mock drill in Kuwait.
AFWA probe
We noticed that guards knocked the man down even before the bangs could be heard. At the same time, no one other than the guards appeared to be panicking. This struck us as odd.
When we reverse-searched frames from the video, we found it was shared on Facebook by the Jordanian news agency Alsaa news in December 2019. Reportedly, the video was from a military exercise in Kuwait.
We also found a video showing the same incident, shot from a different angle. In this video, which was part of a news report, it is clearly visible that this was a mock drill and not a real incident.
| pic.twitter.com/fRWuYgN0Dh — (@AlhadathQ8) December 12, 2019
In the video, the news anchor explained that the drill was conducted during the fifth Gulf Defence and Aerospace Exhibition in Kuwait which officially began on December 10, 2019.
We subsequently checked for videos from the event and found the entrance to the venue of this exhibition resembled the location seen in the viral video.
It is hence clear that the video in question is from a 2019 mock drill in Kuwait and does not capture a real incident in Saudi Arabia.
(With inputs from Sanjana Saxena)
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