Old footage shows flood rescue in Japan, not Bangladesh

Published on August 29, 2024 at 07:36
2 min read
By AFP Bangladesh

A video from 2015 of two people being airlifted to safety after heavy floods hit Japan has racked up hundreds of thousands of views in posts that falsely claimed it was filmed recently in Bangladesh. While Bangladeshi authorities said monsoon rains submerged parts of the South Asian nation in August 2024 and killed dozens of people, the footage was wrongly recirculated in posts praising the Bangladesh army's rescue efforts.

The video has been viewed over 450,000 times after it was shared on Facebook on August 22, 2024. Its Bengali-language caption translated as "Bangladesh army is our pride."

A screenshot of the false post on Facebook

Flash floods wrought havoc in Bangladesh in August, killing at least 40 people (archived links here and here).

The South Asian nation of 170 million people, crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, has seen frequent floods in recent decades.

Monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year, but climate change is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.

The floods added to the woes of a nation still reeling from weeks of political turmoil that culminated in the toppling of autocratic leader Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India by helicopter.

She was replaced by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, who is heading an interim government that faces the monumental task of charting democratic reforms ahead of expected new elections.

The video has also been shared alongside a similar false claim on Facebook here and here.

Japan flooding video

A reverse image search of the video's keyframes on Google followed by keyword searches found the footage published by the International Business Times UK newspaper on YouTube on September 10, 2015 (archived link).

"Japan floods: Couple and their dogs rescued from rooftop after Joso City submerged under water," read the video's title.

AFP reported at the time that parts of Joso city north of the Japanese capital Tokyo were washed away when a levee on the Kinugawa River gave way after heavy rains (archived link).

Below is a screenshot comparison between the falsely shared video on Facebook (left) and the footage from the International Business Times UK (right):

A screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video on Facebook (left) and the video from the International Business Times UK (right)

Similar clips have been published in reports about the flooding in Japan by the US-based NBC News and Turkey's TRT World (archived links here and here).

AFP has also distributed a corresponding picture of the rescue credited to The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

Below is a screenshot of the picture in AFP's archives:

A corresponding picture of the rescue published by The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper

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