An old video of a vehicle-borne explosion is being circulated on social media, particularly on WhatsApp and Facebook, as the CCTV footage of the Pulwama attack on CRPF personnel on February 14, 2019.
The 28-second long video, possibly a CCTV capture of the street, which was shaken by a large intensity explosion, documents a convoy of three vehicles passing through a deserted road.
At the 11 second mark, a huge explosion occurs, impacting the camera, which was mounted at a distance, capturing it. The video is being circulated as that from the deadly attack in Pulwama.
Fact Check
BOOM ran a reverse image search of several frames from the video and found out that it is originally of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), packed in one of the trucks passing the convoy near Camp Taji in Iraq. The video was uploaded by multiple YouTube users as early as April 2008. The dateline of the CCTV video, at the time of filming the explosion is that of 9/2/ 2007.
Tracking down the video
The video is corroborated by another user Brian Spalding, who had uploaded the video on Youtube in December, 2008. “This is a vbied ied right outside of the gate at camp Taji iraq sep 02 2007 I was laying in bed watching a movie when I heard the explosion, and the room shook and blew out the windows. My living quarters were 1/4 mile away.”
A VBIED is a car, lorry, truck bomb, also known as a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) and is an explosive device placed inside cars or other vehicles and detonated.
Brian Spalding’s statement has also been acknowledged by eyewitnesses of the US army, who were stationed at the Taji camp in 2007. A news report compiling attacks in Iraq mentioned multiple bomb attacks on September 2, 2007.
BOOM cannot independently verify the details of the attack in Iraq in the absence of credible news reports. However, we can say that the video is not from Kashmir.
This is not the only video that is claiming to be from the Pulwama attack. Earlier on Saturday, BOOM was the first website to debunk a video of an explosion at a Syrian-Turkish checkpoint that claimed to be from Pulwama.
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