Fact-Check: Unrelated Photos Shared as Visuals From Nepal’s Tara Air Plane Crash

The second photo shows the wreckage of the chopper that was carrying CDS General Bipin Rawat on 8 December 2021.

Neither of these photos are related to the Tara Air plane that crashed in Mustang, Nepal.

(Source: Altered by The Quint)

A set of photographs that shows a plane and what appears to be remnants of a crashed aircraft are being shared on social media, with several users linking them to the Tara Air plane crash that took place in Mustang, Nepal, on Sunday, 29 May.

Tara Air’s aircraft with the call sign 9N-AET, which was carrying 22 people on board, took off from Pokhara, Nepal, at 9:55 am on Sunday and went missing 15 minutes into its flight. It was later found crashed in Mustang, with no survivors.

However, the photos being shared are not connected to the tragedy. The first photo, which we could trace back to 2019, shows a Tara Air plane with the call sign 9N-ABM.

The second photo shows the wreckage of the aircraft that carried Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat, his wife Madhulika Rawat, and other officials and crashed in Tamil Nadu on 8 December 2021.

CLAIM

The photographs are being shared as photos of the Tara Air plane that crashed in Mustang, Nepal, on 29 May.

An archive of this post can be seen here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

Archived versions of more posts can be viewed here, here, and here.

WHAT WE FOUND

We found that neither of the photos were related to the recent Tara Air plane crash.

The first shows another aircraft by the airlines with the call sign 9N-ABM, while the second photograph shows the wreckage of the IAF helicopter that carried CDS General Bipin Rawat, which crashed in Coonoor, Tamil Nadu on 8 December 2021.

IMAGE 1

The first photo shows a plane on the runway.

(Source: Facebook)

First, we saw that the plane in the photograph had ‘9N-ABM’ painted on it.

The plane carried the call sign '9N-ABM'.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

The plane carrying 22 persons on board, which crashed in Nepal’s Mustang had the call sign ‘9N-AET,’ as seen in a tweet by the Indian Embassy in Nepal.

The plane that crashed has the call sign '9NAET'.

(Source: Twitter/Altered by The Quint)

Further, we ran a reverse image search on Google and found that the same photograph was shared on Nepal-related travel and tourism websites.

We found the same photo in a 2019 post on ktmguide.com, a travel website for Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city.

The photo was shared in 2019 as well.

(Source: ktmguide/Altered by The Quint)

IMAGE 2

The second photo shows crash wreckage.

(Source: Facebook)

Running a reverse image search on this photograph took us to a report by Outlook, which carried the photograph in an article about the CDS General Bipin Rawat’s chopper, that crashed on 8 December 2021 in Coonoor, Tamil Nadu.

The image, captioned ‘Wreckages of the crashed IAF Aircraft Mi-17V5’ was credited to news agency PTI.

The image is of the IAF aircraft that crashed in Coonoor.

(Source: PTI/Screenshot)

WHAT HAPPENED IN NEPAL?

Tara Air’s aircraft with the call sign 9N-AET took off from Pokhara airport at 9:55 am on Sunday, 29 May, and was en route to Jomsom airport in Nepal’s hilly regions, where it was supposed to land at 10:15 am.

However, the plane went missing for five hours 15 minutes into the flight.

A day after the incident, the Nepal Army located the crashed plane in the mountainous Mustang district on Monday and confirmed that all 22 people on board – including four Indian nationals – were dead.

Watch The Quint's video report here.

Evidently, neither of the photos shared are related to the Tara Air plane that crashed in Mustang, Nepal on Sunday.

While one photograph shows an entirely different plane, the other shows the remnants of the chopper that crashed on 8 December 2021, while carrying CDS General Bipin Rawat, his wife, and other officials.

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