The footage shows a 2016 flight from Saudi Arabia to Ethiopia
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on July 19, 2019 at 11:00
- 2 min read
- By AFP India
Copyright © AFP 2017-2024. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
The 52-second video was posted here on Facebook on August 27, 2018, and has been viewed over 131,000 times since.
A caption alongside the video says: “This is the Haj Flight from India.”
The video shows a flight cabin strewn with toilet paper and rubbish as well as flooded, soiled toilets.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:
The same video has been shared in multiple Facebook posts in the last month, for example here and here, as well as here on Twitter and here on Instagram.
This claim is false; the footage has circulated online since 2016 in reports about a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight from Jeddah to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
The incident was reported here by Arab News on September 7, 2016 and here by Gulf Business, on the same date.
The first paragraph of the Arab News report reads; “the first flight of Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia) Airbus A330 from Jeddah to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia grabbed international attention for all the wrong reasons.”
“Saudia” is Saudi Arabia’s national airline.
A reverse image search on Yandex using keyframes from the clip obtained using video analysis tool InVID found this LiveLeak video published on September 6, 2016.
The headline reads: ‘The disgusting state of an AirBus A330 of Saudi Arabian Airlines”.
Below is an image comparison screenshot of the video in the misleading post (L) and the 2016 Liveleak video (R):
The video has previously been shared along with another false claim that it shows a British airways flight from London to Islamabad -- a claim debunked by AFP here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
