Claim: A viral picture shows that Pakistan’s flag carrier, the PIA, has hoisted a pride flag at its Amsterdam office.
Fact: The photo shows the PIA’s office in Amsterdam, which has been closed for nearly a decade, rendering the claim false. A spokesperson for the airline said the flag was put up by the municipality for Amsterdam Pride, set to take place from 27 July to 4 August 2024. The office, which is owned by the PIA, has been rented out to another party. However, Gemeente Amsterdam’s Communications Directorate has denied putting up the Progress Pride Flag.
On 19 July 2024, X (formerly Twitter) user @zarakyusufzai posted (archive) a picture of the rainbow Progress Pride Flag positioned atop an office of the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), claiming that the airline “supports pride”.
The caption reads as follows:
“PIA supports pride 🫡”
In the picture, the PIA’s slogan “Great People to Fly With” is visible but its office is shuttered. The flag is, in fact, a “Progress” Pride Flag, which was created by Daniel Quasar in 2018 to focus on inclusivity and progress.
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check first identified the location using markers in the viral image such as “My” and “Falke,” the names of the two shops next to the PIA’s office, as well as comments under and quotes of the X post stating that it is likely Amsterdam.
We found the PIA office on Google Maps, located at Leidsestraat 17, 1017 NT Amsterdam, Netherlands. However, Google’s knowledge panel — information boxes that appear on the left side of the results when a user searches for entities — for it mentions it as “permanently closed”, an option indicating that the said business has stopped operations and would not reopen.
The office is legitimate as, according to a website about business establishments in the Netherlands, the “company is registered with the Chamber of Commerce under KVK number 33127018 and is located in Spiegelbuurt”, a municipality in Amsterdam.
We located the stores next to the PIA office as My Jewellery Boutique (Leidsestraat 19) and FALKE Store (Leidsestraat 21).
For clarification, the first of the aforementioned addresses includes two pictures on Google Maps: one from August 2022 showing a shop named Komono Stores and the other of My Jewellery Boutique from May 2024. This indicates that the former moved to a new address, as evidenced from its website — Heiligeweg 42, 1012 XS Amsterdam — and another outlet took over the same location.
My Jewellery Boutique is not yet available on Google Street View.
We then ran a reverse image search and found that putting up pride flags in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, is a common practice ahead of the Amsterdam Pride, which will be held from 27 July to 4 August 2024. This can be corroborated by photos from the same event over the years available here and here on the media file repository Wikimedia Commons.
Response by PIA’s spokesperson
Soch Fact Check reached out to the PIA’s spokesperson, Abdullah H. Khan, in this regard. He “visited the street and the flags are on nearly all the shops”, he said.
“They are placed by the municipality. You can see the monogram of the municipality on the larger flags. It is due to the pride week, which is between 27 July till 4 August. After that the flags will be removed,” Khan added.
Asked if the PIA still owned the same office or if it was officially closed or sold off, the airline’s spokesperson said, “We own the office. However, we have just rented it out to someone [and] they are renovating the place, then they will remove PIA badges from the outside as well.”
Khan also provided some images from Amsterdam that are viewable below:
The spokesperson also shared a video with us:
The larger flags indeed have the Amsterdam municipality’s name, “Gemeente Amsterdam,” and its logo on them. They also feature the words “liefde [love],” “vrijheid [freedom],” and “jezelf zijn [being yourself],” as well as the URL “www.queerandpride.amsterdam”, which leads to the homepage of the event called “Queer & Pride Amsterdam 2024.”
City of Amsterdam’s response
However, Gemeente Amsterdam’s Communications Directorate has denied putting up the Progress Pride Flag, rendering the PIA spokesperson’s assertion as incorrect. While the flags in the photos and video he shared do, in fact, show the municipality’s logo, the specific flag visible in the viral picture in question does not feature the same.
In its response to our emailed questions, Gemeente Amsterdam’s Communications Directorate said the city administration “did not put up this flag” and that it “does not put up flags at shops and/or other business establishments” but puts up flags “only at its own buildings/facilities”.
“This progress flag is not a part of a campaign by the city of Amsterdam,” the office said, adding, “The city of Amsterdam did not put up the flag at the same location you mentioned. We have no information about the opening or closing of the PIA office in Amsterdam.” It also emphasised that during the Queer & Pride Amsterdam 2024 celebrations, “a lot of citizens, businesses, schools etc. show their support by putting the progress flag up”.
Suspension of PIA’s flights to Amsterdam
Soch Fact Check looked up reports about suspension of the PIA’s flights to Amsterdam and found two — here and here — from July 2013 and two — here and here — from September 2013.
The fourth report, by Voice of America, quoted the airline’s then-spokesperson, Mashood Tajwar, as saying the flights to Frankfurt, Germany, and Amsterdam, Netherlands, were “temporarily suspended”.
We also found relevant information in the discussions on a forum called History of PIA. The last flight operation on the Amsterdam-Frankfurt-Islamabad route arrived in the Pakistani capital on 7 September 2013, one post states.
Another post includes a news clipping of an opinion piece published on 3 December 2018 in the Urdu-language Daily Ausaf with the title “PIA’s 10-million-euro property in the Netherlands has become a ruin”.
In its comments, a user has shared a June 2017 Google Street View link showing the office with its shutters down.
A second user shared a 2018 photo of the closed-down venue. Yet another user shared a news clipping from an 11 January 2018 piece published in Daily Jang, which quotes Tajwar, the PIA’s former spokesperson, as saying the airline’s flights to Amsterdam were closed for five years due to operational reasons and the building where its office is located is not on rent but owned by the company.
The PIA retains the office as it plans to resume its flights to closed destinations in Europe in the near future, the publication quotes him as saying.
We also found a PIA advertisement from 2019 that states the airline “intends to rent out its three properties at Amsterdam on ‘as it is where it is basis’” and one of the locations is listed as Leidsestraat 17. The same was reported on 15 June 2019 by a website called Pakistan Aviation.
In July 2020, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) suspended the PIA’s “authorisation to fly to the bloc for six months” following a major scandal in which Pakistan’s former aviation minister, Ghulam Sarwar Khan, had claimed the licences of a big chunk of the country’s pilots were “dubious”, which led to their grounding. He made the comments in light of a deadly plane crash in Karachi.
There have been multiple reports about developments on the resumption of flights and removing the PIA’s European Union (EU) flight ban this year — here, here, here, here, and here — with the latest one quoting sources as saying the EASA “will hold a meeting in November this year to discuss lifting the ban on all Pakistani airlines including the national flag carrier”.
In March 2024, multiple news outlets reported that Pakistan’s flag carrier was “looking for investors to rehabilitate one of its properties in Amsterdam” and that a team was headed to the Netherlands for the mission.
“A capital investment of 150,000 to 200,000 euros are [sic] needed to rehabilitate the building, which has been lying inactive since 2016. The PIA-owned ground plus three-storey building has been inactive since air operations ceased in 2016,” SAMAA TV’s English website reported, saying the development was confirmed by an airline spokesperson.
We have also reached out to the City of Amsterdam for a comment in this regard. This article will be updated if and when we receive a response.
Soch Fact Check, therefore, concludes that the X post, claiming the PIA put up a pride flag at its Amsterdam office, in solidarity with the queer community, is false.
Virality
Soch Fact Check found that the post has so far garnered upwards of 39,000 views on X. It was also shared here and here on Reddit.
Conclusion: The photo shows the PIA’s office in Amsterdam, which has been closed for nearly a decade, rendering the claim false. A spokesperson for the airline said the flag was put up by the municipality for Amsterdam Pride, set to take place from 27 July to 4 August 2024. The office, which is owned by the PIA, has been rented out to another party. However, Gemeente Amsterdam’s Communications Directorate has denied putting up the Progress Pride Flag.
Correction (23 August 2024): Soch Fact Check has updated the Fact (second line) and the Conclusion (last line) to reflect the response from Gemeente Amsterdam’s Communications Directorate that we received after this article was published. We have also added three paragraphs after the 13th paragraph in the ‘Fact or Fiction?’ section to include the said responses. Our corrections policy is available here.
Background image in cover photo: @PakistanIntAirlines
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