Fact-Check: Image of plane crash falsely shared as an accident from Afghanistan

For the past few days, an image of a plane on fire has been circulating on Facebook. Each of these posts claim that this is a US aircraft that crash landed in Farah province of Afghanistan and the crash injured hundreds of people. The post was circulated in Bengali as well as English.

Other instances of the post can be seen here and here.

Fact-Check:

Upon reverse searching the image on google we found that the image was taken in 2008 and is available on the stock photo website Alamy.

The caption of the image reads, “Explosive Ordinance Disposal personnel from the 447th Expeditionary Civil Engineer Squadron at Sather Air Base, Iraq, detonate explosives to detach the wings from the body of a C-130 Hercules here July 7. The EOD team is using a series of controlled detonations designed to divide the airplane into smaller pieces so it can be easily moved. The C-130 made an emergency landing in a field north of Baghdad International Airport shortly after take-off June 27.”. Therefore this image was taken in Iraq and not Afghanistan.

Hence, this claim is false.

DFRAC Editor

Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Centre (DFRAC) is a non-partisan and independent media organisation which focuses on fact-checking and identifying hate speech. With the popularisation of the internet came the challenge of information overload and often times, our feeds are overpopulated with conflicting, incendiary and false information which is increasingly becoming difficult to ignore and not believe in

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