Video shows newborn rescued in India, not survivor of Morocco earthquake

“A new born baby is dug out of the debris after a magnitude 6.8 earthquake devastates Morocco (sic)” reads a post published on X, formerly Twitter, on September 10, 2023.

Image

A screenshot of the false post, taken on September 13, 2023

The post features a 12-minute clip showing a man digging out a newborn and what looked like a placenta from the dirt. The words “KeshabRajjoshi” appear at the bottom of the footage. Another X account shared the same claim.

Many people in the comment section believed that the baby was rescued after a 6.8 magnitude earthquake devastated Morocco on September 8, 2023.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed and more than 5,000 injured, with the quake wiping out villages atop the Atlas mountains (archived here).

It was Morocco's strongest on record and the deadliest to hit the country since a 1960 earthquake killed between 12,000 and 15,000 people (archived here).

Last-ditch efforts to find more survivors trapped under the rubble were still ongoing as of September 13, 2023. However, the claim the baby was rescued in Morocco is false.

Video from India

Using the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the footage, AFP Fact Check found that a Hindi-speaking account called “ImranTG1” published a longer version of the clip on X on September 9, 2023 – a day after the Morocco disaster (archived here).

The bio of the account showed that it belongs to a photojournalist working for Indian news outlet Amar Ujala.

The caption explained that the baby was dug out of a pit in a field in Purandar village in the Kanpur Dehat district of Uttar Pradesh in northern India.

An AFP translator said the people in the clip spoke Hindi, an official language of Uttar Pradesh and India (archived here).

Times of India reported that a farmer couple rescued the baby and took “him” to a hospital (archived here). The incident was also reported by another local news outlet (archived here).

Police in Kanpur Dehat confirmed to AFP that the video was filmed in Purandar and that the couple that rescued the baby had adopted him.

A newborn was also found buried in Bareilly in northern India in October 2019 (archived here), while another was rescued after being “buried alive” in August 2022 in western India (archived here).