Old Turkey crash image falsely linked to South Asia conflict

Published on May 22, 2025 at 08:42
2 min read
By Rimal FARRUKH, AFP Pakistan

A photo of Turkish military personnel arriving at the site of an air crash in 2016 has surfaced online in posts falsely claiming it showed a Pakistani fighter pilot arrested in India. The claim circulated as the South Asian rivals engaged in four days of intense fighting in May but there has been no official report of such an incident.

"First photo of Pakistani fighter pilot captured by India," says an X post on May 9, 2025, which features a night time picture of a group of people standing in a field.

"He was caught in Lathi near Jaisalmer. He is injured," the post adds, referring to a village in the northwestern Indian city.

Around 70 people were killed during four days of intense fighting in May between nuclear-armed neighbours India and Pakistan, sparked by a deadly attack on tourists by gunmen in Indian-administered Kashmir. New Delhi blamed Islamabad for the assault, which Pakistan denies (archived link).

A May 10 ceasefire ended the intense tit-for-tat drone, missile, aerial combat and artillery exchanges, and both sides have agreed to withdraw their troops back to peacetime positions by the end of the month.

Screenshot of the false post taken May 21, 2025

Similar claims appeared on X and Instagram, while several Indian news media articles featured the same image.

However, there have been no official reports that a Pakistani military pilot was captured in Jaisalmer as of May 22.

A reverse image search on Google found the picture published by photo agency Getty Images on December 12, 2016, credited to AFP (archived link).

The photo's caption in AFP's archives reads: "Turkish military personnel arrive near a Turkish F16 war plane which crashed in Diyarbakir on December 12, 2016" (archived link).

The country's military said the fighter jet crashed near an airport in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir, but the pilot ejected safely, the caption also states. "The cause of the crash was not immediately known but the government said an investigation had been launched."

Screenshot comparison of one of the false posts (left) and the AFP photo from 2016 (right)

The incident was also reported by Turkey's state-run Anadolu Agency, which said the jet crashed during a training session (archived link).

Pakistani media organisation Geo Fact Check debunked similar claims about the photo (archived link).

AFP's fact-checks of misinformation triggered by the recent conflict between Pakistan and India can be found here.

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