Video of demolition in Turkey misrepresented as Venezuela earthquake footage
- Published on June 26, 2026 at 22:51
- 2 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
Two massive earthquakes shook Venezuela on June 24, 2026, collapsing buildings and leaving survivors scrambling to find loved ones trapped under the rubble. But a video claimed across social media to show the tremors toppling a high-rise is misrepresented -- and instead comes from a demolition in Turkey after a different earthquake in 2023.
"Footage shows a building coming down in earthquake-hit Venezuela," said a now-deleted June 25, 2026 post on X.
Similar posts -- including in Spanish -- rocketed across X and other platforms such as Instagram and YouTube after a pair of major earthquakes rattled areas west of Caracas within a minute of each other on June 24.
The 7.2 and 7.5-magnitude quakes -- the second registering as the strongest to hit the country in over a century -- sent hundreds of buildings tumbling, with the northern state of La Guaira hit particularly hard.
The United Nations' aid chief told AFP June 26 that more than 50,000 people were missing, as survivors and rescuers raced to claw out people caught under rubble. Officials say the death toll is still rapidly climbing.
But the video claimed online to show a Venezuela structure falling forward is old and unrelated.
Reverse image searches surfaced the same footage, or screenshots of it, across various Turkish news websites (archived here, here, here and here). Some showed the scene from additional angles.
The reports described the video as a bystander's October 1, 2023 recording capturing the controlled demolition of an apartment building in the Turkish city of Kahramanmaraş. They said the building was severely damaged during a catastrophic 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the country on February 6 of that year.
Further keyword searches traced the video to the Ihlas News Agency, a Turkish wire service that reported that the demolition briefly panicked onlookers because the building collapsed forward, contrary to expectations (archived here).
The agency identified the high-rise as a 15-story Batı Şehir Park building in the Üngüt neighborhood.
Google Street View imagery from 2022 corroborates the location, with more recent imagery captured in 2025 showing the building no longer standing (archived here, here and here).
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in the weeks after the earthquake that around 118,000 buildings collapsed, required urgent demolition or were severely damaged by the tremors.
The disaster killed more than 53,500 people in Turkey.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about Venezuela here.
Copyright © AFP 2017-2026. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
