Old video of fish flopping in Georgia supermarket falsely linked to Dubai floods

Published on April 29, 2024 at 10:21
2 min read
By Qadaruddin SHISHIR, AFP Bangladesh

As heavy floods drenched Dubai in April 2024, a video of fish squirming about on a supermarket floor surfaced in Facebook posts that falsely claimed it showed an incident in the Middle East financial centre. The footage was in fact filmed years earlier in Georgia. It circulated in news reports from February 2018 about fish at a store in the Georgian capital Tbilisi that were left flopping around on the floor after their tank shattered.

"Hailstorm in Dubai flooded the market with water and fish," read a Facebook post written in Bengali that shared the footage on April 18, 2024.

The video, which garnered more than 49,000 views, shows a supermarket aisle inundated with fish wriggling around.

Screenshot of the false post taken on April 24, 2024

The video racked up thousands more views in Facebook posts here and here that also claimed it was filmed in Dubai.

Four people died in heavy flooding in the United Arab Emirates, as the desert country struggled to cope with record rains.

Dubai was particularly badly hit by the rainfall, the heaviest since records began 75 years ago.

Georgia supermarket

A reverse image search and keyword searches found the video published in an article which said it was filmed in Georgia in 2018.

United Press International reported that the video was filmed on February 2, 2018 at a grocery store in the Georgian capital Tbilisi (archived link).

It quoted the shopper who filmed the clip saying that the fish tank shattered in an aisle.

Screenshot from United Press International's report on the incident, taen on Aprill 29, 2024

A YouTube video that shared the clip on February 3, 2018 said it was filmed at a Carrefour supermarket in Tbilisi (archived link).

The video appears to have been filmed at the Carrefour branch on Tbilisi's Ilia Chavchavadze Avenue.

A photo of the branch posted on Google Maps shows various similarities to the scene in the video (archived links here and here).

Below are screenshots from the video (left, centre) compared to the photo from Carrefour on Ilia Chavchavadze Avenue (right).

Screenshot from the video (left, center) compared to the Google Maps photo (right), with similarities highlighted by AFP

Georgian-language signs are also seen in the video.

A Georgian-language sign reading 'Chinese products' seen in the video

Read more fact checks on the United Arab Emirates flooding here.

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