Years-old footage of tragic Pakistan train fire misrepresented as 'deadly fire in February 2025'

Published on February 20, 2025 at 02:42
2 min read
By Masroor GILANI, AFP Pakistan

An old video of a deadly train fire has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times after it was shared online in false posts claiming it shows a fire that supposedly killed five people in central Pakistan in February 2025. The video has in fact circulated in reports about a blaze onboard a crowded train which killed 74 people in October 2019.

The video, showing several train carriages engulfed in flames, was viewed more than 123,000 times after it was posted on Facebook on February 9, 2025.

Its Urdu-language caption read in part: "Breaking News. Five people were killed and several others wounded after a Tezgam train caught fire near Liaqatpur Tanwari station."

"According to sources, the train was going from Karachi to Lahore."

The Tezgam, one of Pakistan's oldest and most popular rail services, runs between the southern port city of Karachi to the garrison city of Rawalpindi, neighbouring Islamabad. The town of Liaqatpur is along the train route, in central Pakistan (archived link) .

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on February 11, 2025

The same video was shared elsewhere on Facebook and X in posts that also claimed it showed a fire that broke out aboard a train in February 2025.

"So sad," read a comment on one of the posts.

Another said: "May Allah have mercy. How come all the carriages suddenly caught fire?"

But an official with the Liaqatpur police and a Pakistan Railways spokesperson both told AFP there have been no recent train fire incidents.

"No fire incident in any train took place in the last year," Pakistan Railways spokesman Babar Ali Raza said on February 17, adding that the video actually shows a fire that occurred in 2019.

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video led to a report about a fire that ripped through a Tezgam Express train in October 2019, killing 74 people (archived link).

According to officials, the fire started when gas cylinders used by some passengers to cook breakfast exploded, sending flames racing through three carriages as the train passed near Rahim Yar Khan, in Punjab province.

Gas cylinders are supposedly banned on trains, and Pakistan's then-railways minister Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed said it had been a "mistake" to allow them on board.

The footage circulating on social media was shared at the time in news outlets, including in X posts by BBC Urdu and 92 News on October 31 and November 1, 2019 (archived here and here).

Screenshots comparison of the falsely shared video (left) and the BBC Urdu video (right)

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