Fact-Check: Video From China Falsely Shared as Recent Blast in Pakistan

The video shows a gas pipeline blowing up in China's Anping County.

A video showing fire in a street and debris scattered in bylanes is being shared on social media platforms to claim that it showed a blast in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa area.

(Archives of more claims can be seen here, here and here.)

Is it true?: No. The video reportedly shows a gas pipeline explosion in north China's Anping County, which claimed two lives on 29 July.

What happened in Pakistan?: A blast occurred at a Jamiat Ulema Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) rally in Khar tehsil, in Pakistan's Khyber Pakthunkhwa area on 30 July.

• It killed at least 56 people, including one JUI-F leader, injuring nearly 200 others.

• The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has claimed responsibility for the blast, which was a suicide bombing, reported The Guardian.

How did we find out?: We took screenshots of the viral video and ran reverse image searches on some of them.

• One such search showed us several results with posts on Chinese microblogging website Weibo.

Using a virtual private network (VPN), we accessed these results.

• One result showed a post by a verified account of the website Boiling Video (a subsidiary of a news organisation called Yidian News), which was posted on 29 July, a day before the blast in Pakistan.

• Its caption, when translated, mentioned that the video showed the aftermath the of natural gas in Anping Country, Hebei province in China.

• The post added that the explosion caused two deaths and serious injured two people.

• This post carried visuals similar to the video in the claim.

News reports: Chinese news agency Xinhua also published a report on this, mentioning that the incident took place around 10:13 am at Hongqi street and was extinguished nearly an hour later.

• The report added that as per preliminary investigation, the explosion was caused due the the rupture of the gas pipeline during a pipeline renovation.

• The same information was also published by other Chinese websites, such as Sohu, China Daily and Tencent's QQ China.

• We were unable to independently geolocate the visuals.

Conclusion: A video showing an explosion caused due to a damage to a gas pipeline in China is being falsely linked to the recent blast in Pakistan.

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