Video shows Pakistani paraglider, not parachuting Indian air force pilot

Published on May 16, 2025 at 09:55
2 min read
By Akshita KUMARI, AFP India

Hours before New Delhi and Islamabad agreed to a ceasefire that brought a halt to days of intense fighting, a video was shared in posts falsely claiming it showed an Indian air force pilot who ejected from their plane and landed in Pakistan. The video was in fact filmed a year earlier on Instagram by a user who said it showed him paragliding in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

"Indian female pilot landed safely in Pakistan," reads the caption of a Facebook video shared on May 10, 2025.

The video, which appears to show people running towards a descending parachutist, was shared hours before a ceasefire ended four days of conflict between the nuclear-armed South Asian rivals (archived link).

They exchanged tit-for-tat missile, drone and fighter jet attacks after New Delhi launched strikes against what it described as "terrorist infrastructure" across the countries' shared frontier. The fighting left around 70 people dead on both sides.

India had claimed Pakistan backs the militants it says were behind an April attack in which 26 people were killed in Indian-administered Kashmir -- a charge Islamabad denies.

Screenshot of the false Facebook post, captured on May 15, 2025

The video also circulated in similar Instagram and X posts.

But the video was in fact filmed a year before the current conflict.

Pakistani paraglider

A reverse image search on Google using keyframes from the falsely shared video led to the same footage published on Instagram on March 26, 2024 (archived link).

"Landing at Lower Dir, KpK," reads its caption, which also contains the hashtag "paragliding".

Lower Dir is a district in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Screenshot comparison of the falsely shared video (left) and the Instagram video from March 2024 (right)

The person who shared the video, Sharjeel Khattak, also posted another clip on his Instagram page on May 10, 2025 where he says he is a paragliding pilot from Pakistan and his footage had been misrepresented online (archived link).

"A months-old video of my paragliding landing is now being wrongly shared online with the false claim that an Indian pilot was captured by locals. This was just a regular paragliding flight — I’m safe, I’m local, and definitely not a pilot from across the border," reads his post.

He added, "Let’s not spread misinformation — and let’s keep flying high, the right way!"

AFP has debunked other misinformation stemming from the India-Pakistan crisis here.

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