On the two-year anniversary of the Pulwama terror attack, CCTV footage of a bombing in Iraq has been revived on social media with the claim that it shows the 2019 explosion, which took the lives of 40 CRPF jawans in Jammu and Kashmir.
The video could be traced back to September 2007, when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) was set off in Iraq.
CLAIM
Several users shared the video with the caption, “14 Feb Black Day” and “Say no to Valentine’s Day.”
WHAT WE FOUND
A reverse image search led us to a video uploaded on YouTube on March 2008, stating that it is from Iraq.
We also found the video on Reddit, where a user ‘WhiteSix’ claimed that a VBIED had been detonated outside “Camp Taji/Camp Cooke 45 minutes north of Baghdad on Highway 1.”
Taking hints from this we performed a keyword search and came across the same video uploaded by a user Brian Spalding on YouTube, dated December 2008.
The user claimed to be at camp Taji at the time of the incident, which he stated took place on 2 September 2007.
Camp Taji is also known as Camp Cooke and is used as a military base by the Iraqi army and coalition forces.
We found the earliest version of the video dated 1 November 2007 on the website, military.com. The video was also used as archival footage in a news report by AP, credited to Tencate, a company that makes armor for military vehicles, dated 25 October 2013, much before the Pulwama attack took place.
We also found a news report by California-based publishers, McClatchy, dated 2 September 2007, which states that “a suicide car bomb targeted the first gate of the Iraqi Army Taji base,” which killed two soldiers and injured eight others.
Further, the National Investigation Agency had found CCTV footage of the explosive-laden Murti Eeco car being driven by suicide bomber Aadil Dar on the day of the attack, in the area near Awantipora. However, we found no credible news reports on CCTV footage of the attack itself.
The Quint’s WebQoof team had also debunked the same claim in 2019.
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