Old, Stitched Video Shared as Footage of PAF Shooting IAF Aircraft
Pakistanis on social media shared the video as footage of the PAF aircraft shooting down an Indian aircraft.
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On Wednesday, 27 February, Pakistan claimed it had shot down two Indian Air Force aircraft. According to their claim, one aircraft fell on Pakistani soil, while the other fell on Indian soil.
CLAIM
A video that claims to be of a PAF jet engaging with an IAF aircraft has gone viral on Twitter, with many users calling the Pakistani pilot a hero. In the video, a pilot can be seen inside an airborne aircraft. He says that he is in position and requests permission to shoot. After getting approval from another man in the video, he launches a missile, which brings down another aircraft.
The video was tweeted by many Pakistani users, who used hashtags such as #PakistanArmyZindabad, #PakArmyZindabad.
The video was also uploaded on YouTube.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The Quint conducted a reverse image search to get to the bottom of the video. One of the first results, from the beginning of the video, leads to a YouTube video that was published on 7 February 2019, with the headline ‘PAF Veterans 🇵🇰 Grp Capt Azman Khalil’ with the hashtag #PakArmyZindabad.
While the video matched the beginning of the viral clip completely, a further search with the headline directed us to a website called Pakistan Defence, a forum for discussions about the military. On the website, there is a thread which speaks about G/C Azman Khalil sharing his experience, where the same video features again. This link explains that this is a video of Wing Commander Azman Khalil performing a F-16 display on PAF's Veterans Day, taken using a GoPro. The video is dated April 2015.
Further searches of the later parts of the viral clip involving the missile being shot took us to a host of multiple videos of the Pakistan Air Force. The third video that showed up, called Pakistan Air Force Live Mission showed the source of the viral clip. While the video in this link begins differently, from 1.36 till 2.10, it is exactly the same as the clip.
This video too was published much earlier, on 2 October 2016.
But it can be seen that this video is also a stitched version of two videos, in the part where the missile is released and the screen is split into two halves.
A search for the same image on Yandex threw up a result for a website called Daily News Agency, which was in a different language. On translating the page, it became clear that that the missile-releasing part of the clip came from this video.
This video too was published on 1 July 2015.
All of the above proves that the viral clip in question is not of the PAF shooting down an Indian aircraft on 27 February, but is actually a chunk of the much older Pakistan Air Force Live Mission video from 2016, which itself took from two videos from 2015. It is a fake, stitched together video that is being used incorrectly as actual footage from Wednesday’s attack.
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