2018 event in Saudi Arabia portrayed as visuals of Holi celebrations at Atal Tunnel in India - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
April 1, 2021
A video is being shared on social media claiming it as the visuals of Holi celebrations at Atal tunnel in Sri Nagar. This video shows colour fireworks near a building. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video of Holi celebrations at Atul tunnel in Srinagar.
Fact: The video shared in the post shows daylight fireworks at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (KACWC) art centre in 2018. KACWC, also called as ‘Ithra’ culture centre celebrated the ‘Tanween 2018’ cultural event with daylight fireworks. This video has nothing to do with India’s Holi festival and the newly constructed Atal tunnel. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On reverse image search, videos with similar visuals were found posted on social media at least since 2018. They can be seen here, here and here. These posts mentioned that the visuals are from colourful fireworks at the ‘Ithra’ building in Saudi Arabia. King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture (KACWC), also known as the ‘Ithra’ art culture centre is located in Daharan city of Saudi Arabia. A similar video of colour fireworks was found in a tweet by Dr Abdullah Bin Khalid, an assistant professor at Naif Arab University for Security Science. He described this video as ‘Beautiful daylight fireworks show at Ithra in Daharan’.
Beautiful daytime fireworks show at @Ithra in Dhahran pic.twitter.com/paf8Y92wTb
When we searched for the details of these celebrations using the relevant keywords, it is found out that the ‘Ithra’ art centre celebrated the ‘Tanween 2018’ cultural event with daylight fireworks on 20 October 2018. ‘Ithra’ published the videos of this event on their official social media handles. They can be seen here and here.
On searching for Saudi Arabia’s ‘Ithra’ art centre building in Google Maps, we could see a similar visual of the building in search results.
Atal tunnel, the world’s longest highway tunnel located in Himachal Pradesh was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on 03 October 2020. The Ministry of Tourism tweeted the visuals of the Atal tunnel in Himachal Pradesh. The Atul Tunnel looks completely different from the building visible in the posted video.
To sum it up, visuals of a 2018 cultural event celebrations in Saudi Arabia are portrayed as those of Holi celebrations at Atal Tunnel in India.