A photo collage of three old and unrelated pictures, which shows smoke billowing from different structures, is being circulated on Twitter with a claim that an accident has happened in Pokhran, Rajasthan.
But in reality, neither are these images from Pokhran nor are they recent. Two of the below attached images are from a bomb blast that happened in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2017. And one image is from 2015 when an unexploded World War Two bomb was detonated by the British army at Cliffe in Kent, England.
CLAIM
The same pictures have also been used in a video which was uploaded on YouTube by a user called ‘Haqooq TV’ on 7 July.
The narration in the video suggests that three bombs were planted at ‘Pokhran nuclear plant’ of which one exploded. It further suggests that the media is hiding the news.
The pictures have also been shared on Twitter.
But the pictures are neither from Pokhran nor are they recent. This is what we found out.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
To begin with, there is no nuclear plant in Pokhran. India conducted its nuclear tests in Pokhran first in 1974 and then in 1998.
IMAGE 1
On conducting a reverse image search on the image using Yandex search engine, we found out that the image is from 2017 and was taken in Kabul. The same image was used in an article on the the German website ‘The Local’.
The article mentioned the bombing which rocked the city of Kabul in 2017 in which at least 80 people were killed. We found the same picture on various other websites with the same context. The image has been attributed to ‘Rafiullah Kaleem/DPA’.
IMAGE 2
On conducting a reverse search on this picture we were directed to an article which was published in 2015 on BBC. The article carried the same image and mentioned that it showed a bomb which was destroyed by the British army at Cliffe in Kent.
We further searched for the image and found another story in The Guardian which has the same image. This image was attributed to ‘Richard Watt/PA’. We then searched for the photographer’s Twitter profile and found the picture on it which too mentioned that it showed a bomb which was destroyed by the British army.
IMAGE 3
We conducted a reverse search on the image and found it on the Twitter handle of the head of TOLO News, which is a news channel based out of Afghanistan. The tweet mentioned that the images were from the 2017 Kabul attack.
We haven’t been able to independently verify this image but the fact that it existed in 2017 makes it clear that it doesn’t show the current situation in Pokran.
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