Video of Army Destroying Pak Bunker Discredited With Edited Image

The viral image shared by Pakistani journalists to discredit video of Indian Army destroying Pak bunkers is edited.

An edited image was used to discredit the video broadcast by Indian news channels claiming that it shows the Indian army destroying Pakistani bunkers.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

On Friday, 13 November, several news channels including NDTV, India Today and others broadcast a video with a claim that it is from the Line of Control (LoC) where the Indian Army in a befitting reply to Pakistan’s violation of the ceasefire, destroyed their bunkers.

Soon after that, an image of a frame from the video was circulated to discredit the aforementioned video. The image claimed that the video shared by Indian news channels is actually from Syria and dates back to 2019.

However, The Quint found that the viral image has been edited by superimposing a frame from the video broadcast on news channels with text from the title of a one-year-old YouTube video from Syria.

CLAIM

Among those who shared the screenshot on Twitter as a “proof” of the video being fake are Pakistani journalists Mubasher Lucman and Shahid Raza.

Lucman shared the screenshot with a caption which reads: “Fake video released by Indians yesterday. This is Syria last year. Khara Sach”, while Raza tagged NDTV’s Vishnu Som and India Today’s Shiv Aroor asking them to issue corrections for airing a “fake video”.

An archived version of the tweet can be accessed here.(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

An archived version of the tweet can be accessed here.(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

An archived version of the post can be accessed here.(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

WHAT WE FOUND

To verify the claims made by users sharing the screenshot we fragmented the aforementioned video into multiple keyframes using the InVid Google Chrome extension and ran a reverse image search on the frame used in the screenshot. However, it did not throw up any relevant results.

Next, we carefully observed the viral screenshot and found some red flags.

• While the screenshot went viral on Twitter and Facebook, there was no trace of the video from which it was taken.
• The screenshot shared by multiple users looked the same irrespective of the device used to capture it (desktop/mobile).

Further, we searched the text at the bottom of the screenshot on YouTube and found a video with the same title.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

We watched the video frame by frame but couldn’t find the image used in the viral screenshot.

Moreover, there’s a watermark at the bottom of this YouTube video which reads “Battles for Syria | June 9th 2019 | Jihadists attack Al Qasabiyah, South Idlib province.” This watermark is missing in the screenshot. We can also see a logo at the top-right corner in the video, which is missing in the screenshot.

We weren’t able to independently verify the video, but well-placed sources in the Indian Army told us that it is authentic and of a recent attack by the Indian side at the LoC after Pakistan violated the ceasefire.

Evidently, an edited screenshot was shared on Twitter to falsely claim that India circulated a fake video of destroying Pakistani bunkers at the LoC.

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