Old videos and photos do not show fatal Indian helicopter crash
Old videos and photos do not show fatal Indian helicopter crash
(Reuters) - Old videos and photographs are circulating on social media, with users falsely saying they show the helicopter crash that killed India’s defense chief Bipin Rawat and 12 others on Dec. 8, 2021.
Rawat, his wife and 11 other people died after the military helicopter crashed in Tamil Nadu, southern India (here), (here).
One video shared on social media shows a helicopter engulfed in flames, spiraling at high altitude before plummeting to the ground. A user who shared the clip via Facebook said: “Indian Army helicopter crash carrying CDS General Shri Bipin Rawat Ji and other senior Army officials in Tamil Nadu” (here).
One post of the miscaptioned videos had been shared more than 73,000 times on Facebook at the time of writing (here).
A reverse image search of key frames shows the video depicts a different helicopter crash that took place in Syria in 2020.
The Telegraph uploaded the video to YouTube in Feb. 2020 with the headline: “Syrian helicopter shot down by rebels in Idlib” (here).
Another video of the downed helicopter in Syria was published by the Associated Press in Feb. 2020 (here).
The video has a history of being miscaptioned, and was previously falsely linked by social media users to the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict in Sept. 2020 (here).
One user who shared the video on Twitter said: “First video of the today’s helicopter crash in which CDS Gen. Bipin Rawat died along with 12 others. RIP” (here).
But a reverse search showed that the Indian outlet ANI had uploaded the video to Twitter on Nov. 18, weeks before the December crash (here). ANI described it as: “video of the Indian Air Force Mi-17 helicopter that crash-landed near a helipad in Eastern Arunachal Pradesh today with two pilots and three crew members. All of them are safe with minor injuries.”
Other miscaptioned photographs have also resurfaced, one showing individuals standing beside what appears to be a crashed military helicopter by a river. Another shows the site where an army vehicle crashed in an overgrown forest area. Examples of the miscaptioned photographs can be seen (here), (here).
Both photographs are unrelated to the December helicopter crash. The first photograph was published on numerous news platforms in Oct. 2019, including the Deccan Herald, NDTV and The Quint, following an emergency landing of an army helicopter in Poonch, India.
Although Reuters could not independently identify the origin of the image, the second photograph is certainly not recent and was found in blogs related to a helicopter accident in Colombia in July 2020 where at least nine military personnel died.
VERDICT
Miscaptioned. Photos and videos of crashed or downed helicopters circulating online do not show the crash of a military helicopter on Dec. 8, 2021 that killed India’s defense chief and 12 others.
