Fact-Check: Old Video of Livestock in Floods Shared as Recent Visuals

We could trace the video back to 2020, which makes it clear that it is not a recent one.

(Source: Altered by The Quint)

A video showing dead livestock in muddy waters in a flooded area is doing the rounds on social media, claiming to show recent visuals of loss of life during floods.

Heavy rains and floods have affected several parts of the country, which have displaced over 9,000 in Gujarat and have claimed at least 80 lives in Maharashtra since the monsoons began.

Delhi, parts of Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana have seen heavy rains, and have also received heavy rain warnings.

Some users on social media are sharing the video as a clip from Pakistan, where at least 68 people have lost their lives owing to floods and torrential rains, as on 12 July 2022.

However, we could trace the video back to November 2020. As per the news reports that we found, the incident took place in Saudi Arabia's Shuaib Arar, when parts of the Kingdom near its northern border were battered with floods. The area experienced flash floods that claimed many lives.

CLAIM

The video is being shared to claim that it shows recent visuals of loss of life of livestock during rains and floods.

An archive of this post can be seen here.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

Archives of posts with similar claims, including those that place the video in different parts of Pakistan, can be accessed here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We divided the video into keyframes and ran a reverse image search on them across search engines. On Yandex, a Russian search engine, we came across the same video on YouTube, dated 12 November 2020.

It was published with an Arabic caption, which loosely translates to – "More than 1,000 sheep have died in Shuaib Arar due to torrential rains in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

The video was published in November 2020.

(Source: YouTube/Altered by The Quint)

Taking a cue from this, we looked for news reports or visuals regarding floods Shuaib Arar in 2020 with Arabic keywords.

The results led us to an article by Saudi Arabian news portal Akhbaar 24, which mentioned that all sheep that had lost their lives belonged to one person.

The report added that the region's meteorological authority had issued warnings for thunderstorms that week.

We also found a tweet shared by RT Arabic on 18 November 2020, which mentioned that torrential downpours had claimed the lives of "about a thousand sheep" in Shuaib Arar, on the northern border of Saudi Arabia.

The video was shared in 2020, and mentioned that it was from Shuaib Arar.

(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

We were not able the independently verify the location of the incident.

Evidently, the video is an old one and does not show recent visuals of loss of lives due to rains or floods.

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