This clip actually shows a landslide in Indonesia
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on May 27, 2020 at 10:45
- 5 min read
- By AFP Sri Lanka
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The 30-second video was published here on Facebook on May 20, 2020.
The post's caption reads: “Hatton Colombo road at Diyagala please be careful and safe”.
The Hatton-Colombo road is a major road that links Hatton, a town in Sri Lanka’s central province, with the capital, Colombo. Diyagala is a hilly town in western Sri Lanka.
The video was also shared here on Facebook alongside a similar claim.
The claim is false; the footage actually shows a landslide in Indonesia in April 2020.
A reverse image search of keyframes extracted from the misleading post using InVID-WeVerify, a digital verification tool, found the video also appeared in this April 9, 2020, report by Indonesian media outlet Tribunnews about a landslide in a village in Indonesia's West Java province.
The report’s Indonesian-language headline translates to English as: “Video of the Moment a Hill Landslide Occurs in Cianjur, It Is Sad Residents Busy Recording Without Warning Motorists.”
The report's first three paragraphs state: “A video that shows the moment of a hill landslide in Cianjur is circulated on social media.
“It is sad, however, that the local residents were merely busy recording the incident without warning the motorists driving by.
“Deham, disaster duty official at the Regional Disaster Management Agency at Cianjur regency, said that apart from flash floods, his office also received reports of two residents who were buried the landslide at Sukanegara-Pagelaran Road, Thursday, April 9, 2020, at around 4 pm Indonesian Western Time.”
Cianjur regency is a district in West Java.
Below is a screenshot comparison between the video in the misleading post (L) and the Tribunnews video (R):
The landslide was also reported in other Indonesian media outlets, such as Kompas.com and Radar Cianjur.
A further online search found the video was previously posted on April 9, 2020, here by an Instagram account called visitcianjur.
Translated from Indonesian to English, the caption says: “Horrifying! An amateur video shows the moment a motorist is nearly buried by a landslide, luckily the motorist can evade it, location at Sukanagara district, location at the turn of Tarumanagara Field (Sukanagara Square) - South Cianjur. The incident occured around 4 pm Indonesia Western Time.”
The location of the landslide can be seen here on Google Street View.
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