Footage of 2019 Bus Accident in Pak Passed off as PIA Crash Video
The clip shows passengers panic as jerking occurs, before they are thrown forward towards the cameras.
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On 22 May, a Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) flight PK-8303, which was flying from Lahore to Karachi, crashed in a residential neighbourhood of the latter with 99 people on board. Only two people survived the crash, according to reports.
Now, CCTV footage claiming to be of the last moments of the flight and its passengers before it crashed has emerged. However, it is not of the PIA flight crash at all, but is old and from a bus accident that took place in Pakistan in September 2019.
CLAIM
The short clip shows passengers sitting normally initially only to panic as jerking occurs, before they are thrown forward towards the cameras.
Many people shared this clip on Facebook with similar claims.
The post above, uploaded by a Facebook channel called International Broadcasting and News Network - IBANN, had 842k views and over 3k shares at the time this story was published.
Many others shared the video on Facebook with this claim: “The horrific footage of PIA passenger jet that crushed along with 90 passengers in #Pakistan.”
The video was also shared with the same claim on Twitter.
WHAT WE FOUND
On looking at the CCTV footage carefully, we noticed that it seemed to resemble the inside of a bus more than a plane. The seats, the width of the aisle, the curtains on the windows and the overhead cabins looked much more like that of a bus than any plane.
On splitting the video and running a reverse search on its keyframes, we came across several of the same videos which all claimed to be from a bus accident involving a company called Faisal Movers, according to the captions of the YouTube videos.
All the videos seemed to have been uploaded between 2 and 3 October 2019 and said that the accident had occurred on the motorway between Lahore and Islamabad.
On watching one of these videos, we found that the footage originally carried the date and time of the recording, which was actually whitened out in the viral version of the video.
According to the timestamp, the video had been recorded on 28 September 2019 and the time of the accident was approximately 10:24 am.
On searching for news reports about a bus accident on 28 September 2019 in Pakistan, we found an article by a website called Urdu Point which said that the accident had taken place in Pakistan’s Kot Momin police precincts. The accident, according to the website, had happened due to rash driving.
Using the location of Kot Momin as a clue, we further searched for news reports and came across a website called Dialogue Pakistan which corroborated the details. It also carried more videos of the accident, which matched the viral video and the ones we came across as well.
Therefore, it is clear that the viral video that claims to be footage of the last moments of the PIA flight is actually from a bus accident in Pakistan from September 2019.
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