On 12 June 2025, Air India Flight AI 171, a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner bound for London Gatwick, crashed shortly after taking off from Ahmedabad. The aircraft lost altitude within minutes and went down in the Meghani Nagar area near the airport, erupting in flames (here, here). It crashed into the hostel building of B.J. Medical College and Civil Hospital, which was reportedly housing medical students at the time. Over 240 people were on board, including nationals of India, the UK, Portugal, and Canada (here). Rescue and investigation efforts are ongoing, led by the DGCA, AAIB, and Air India.
In this context, a video (here, here, and here) is being shared widely on social media that allegedly shows passengers inside the Air India plane, chanting Allah Hu Akbar before the crash. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video shows passengers chanting Allah Hu Akbar inside the Air India plane that crashed in Ahmedabad on 12 June 2025
Fact: The video is from September 2024 and shows the passengers inside the Air Algérie plane chanting Allah Hu Akbar after learning about a technical glitch during a flight to Istanbul. It has no connection to the recent incident in Ahmedabad, India. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the claim, we took keyframes from the viral video and reverse-searched them online. This led us to news reports and social media posts (here and here) from September 2024 that contained the visuals seen in the viral video. This makes it clear that the video predates the 12 June 2025 Ahmedabad plane crash incident.
As per these reports, this incident happened on 23 September 2025, and the visuals show passengers inside an Air Algérie plane travelling from Algeria (Algiers International Airport) to Istanbul, Turkey, chanting Allah Hu AKbar after learning about a technical glitch in the aeroplane. A news report by Echoroukonline contained a Facebook video posted by a page named ‘info trafic algérie’, which contained the visuals seen in the viral video. As per its description, the visuals show scenes inside an AH3018 flight, from Algiers to Istanbul, which made an emergency landing after a technical malfunction.
A news report published on 25 September 2024 by Al Jazeera contains different visuals from the same plane, in which we can see distressed passengers chanting Allah Hu Akbar. After observing a technical malfunction an hour after take off, the flight’s pilot decided to return to the Algiers International Airport/Houari Boumediene International Airport. A video report on this incident was published by Morocco World News, also mentioning the same details.
To sum up, an old video of passengers chanting Allah Hu Akbar inside an Air Algérie plane is falsely linked to the June 2025 Air India plane accident.
