Claim: A video circulating on social media shows a large fire that broke out at a Pakistani power plant near Guddu, Sindh in July 2022.
Fact: The video has been making rounds on social media since 2021 and in fact depicts a fire that broke out by Afghanistan’s largest trade crossing with Iran.
On 15 July 2022, Facebook user Shakeel Ahmad shared a video with an Urdu caption that translated into English reads, “Fire incidents have started once again under the Shehbaz government. According to sources, the fire at the Guddu power plant has caused a loss of up to 15 billion rupees to the national treasury.”
The 23-second clip shows thick fumes of black smoke and fire raging in the distance, before an explosion sends a large fireball into the sky.
Fact or Fiction?
The video went viral after a fire broke out during Eid holidays on 10 July 2022 at Pakistan’s Guddu Power Plant, causing billions of rupees of damage, as reported by Geo News.
Soch Fact Check took screenshots of the video in question and conducted a reverse image search on Yandex which turned up a news report from Russian website Seldon.com published on 14 February, 2021.
The report is titled “In Afghanistan photographed on video of ten blowing-up fuel trucks”. The news article explains that fuel tanks caught on fire near the Iran-Afghanistan border, causing a large blaze in the area.
A keyword search on Google turned up a report featuring the video with a Persian caption published on Facebook by BBC Dari, the British broadcaster’s Afghan news service, on February 18, 2021.
Screenshots from the six and 10-second marks in the video were also featured in a 15 February 2021 news article by Turkish daily newspaper Korkusuz.
Virality
Soch Fact Check conducted a CrowdTangle analysis for the 30-day period from 24 June to 25 July using the following search terms:
- “Video caption in Urdu”
گڈو پاور پلانٹ میں آگ لگنے سے قومی خزانے کو ذرائع کے مطابق 15 ارب تک کا نقصان ہوا ہے
- “Guddu power plant fire”
The first keyword search turned up 32 interactions across 13 video posts on Facebook.
The second keyword term garnered 236 interactions across 12 videos.
The video with the false claim has been shared here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here on Facebook. On Twitter, it was posted here, here, here, and here between 15 – 25 July 2022.
Conclusion: A power plant near Guddu, Sindh in Pakistan caught fire on 10 July 102022. However, the video circulating online allegedly depicting the incident is, in fact, from 2021 and shows fuel tanks ablaze near the Iran-Afghanistan border.