At least 6 people were killed and 81 others injured in an explosion on a busy street in central Istanbul in Turkey on Sunday.
Following this, harrowing visuals, reportedly from the incident, went viral on social media. EastMojo has come across one such CCTV footage shared on social media platforms. One Facebook user (Munir Ahmed) shared the video on Sunday with caption, “Istanbul blast this morning.”
However, we found that the video is not related with the recent blast in Istanbul.
Fact-check
We watched the video carefully and noticed the date on the top edge of the screen. One can clearly see the time mark – “19/03/2016”. This indicates that the video is from 2016.
We fragmented the video into several keyframes and performed Google and Yandex reverse image search on some of those. This led us to a report published in Milliyet, a Turkish news website, on March 19, 2016.
Though the video included in the report doesn’t show the explosion, one can easily see the similarities it has with the viral video.
According to the report (originally in Turkish), the footage shows a suicide attack in Istanbul on March 19, 2016.
We ran a keyword search on Google and found a BBC report on the said incident.
“A suicide bomb attack at a busy shopping area in the Turkish city of Istanbul has killed at least four people, officials say. They include two Israelis with dual US nationality, and an Iranian. Another 36 were injured in the blast near a government building,” it reported.
Thus, it is clear that the blast seen in the CCTV footage took place in 2016 in Istanbul and is not related with the recent one.
Also Read | One more Indian national killed in Maldives garage fire; toll rises to 8