No, this is not a video of the Indian Kashmir attack on February 14, 2019
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on February 19, 2019 at 09:30
- 2 min read
- By AFP India
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
The February 14, 2019 attack took place in Pulwama district just outside the main city of Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir. Here is an AFP story about the incident.
This Facebook post, dated February 16, 2019, contains a video, which has been viewed more than 72,000 times, of a huge explosion hitting vehicles on a dual-carriage road.
The video is captioned: “#Pulwama attack cctv.” The footage carries no time or date stamp to indicate when or where the blast took place.
The same footage also appears in many other Facebook posts that claim it shows the Pulwama attack, some of which have been shared tens of thousands of times, for example here, here and here. It is also on Youtube, for example here.
A reverse image search using key frames obtained through verification tool InVID shows that the video has been online since 2007 and therefore does not show the February 14, 2019, attack in Kashmir.
This video on Youtube published on October 30, 2007, contains the same footage with the caption: "This is a video sent to me of a blast in Iraq."
The 2007 YouTube footage has a time and date stamp in the upper-left-hand corner that says the video was filmed on September 2, 2007, just before 4:00pm.
Another video on Youtube, published on December 8, 2008, and viewed more than 139,000 times, contains the same footage with the caption: "This is a vbied ied right outside of the gate at camp Taji iraq sep 02 2007." Vbied stands for vehicle-based improvised explosive device.
This clip carries the same time and date stamp as the October 2007 video. A third video on YouTube, published in September 2010, also says the blast took place in Iraq.
A McClatchy Newspapers report, from September 2, 2007, says: "Around 4 p.m., a suicide car bomb targeted the first gate of the Iraqi Army Taji base killing 2 soldiers and injuring 8 others".
The McClatchy report appears to match the time and date stamp on the videos, as well as the caption referring to "camp Taji", located here on Google Maps:
The footage is also unlikely to be from an Indian-administered territory because cars in India drive on the left but the vehicles in the video are clearly driving on the right side of the road.
Other fact-checking organisations have also debunked the misleading use of the video, including Boom and altnews.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
