Following the terrorist attack in Pahalgam on 22 April 2025, which claimed the lives of 25 Indian and one Nepali citizen, the Indian Armed Forces launched ‘Operation Sindoor’ in the early hours of 07 May 2025. The Indian government stated that the operation targeted terrorist infrastructure at nine locations across Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, emphasising that no Pakistani military installations were struck. It described the strikes as focused, measured, and non-escalatory.
Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh reportedly stated that at least 100 terrorists were killed during the operation. However, Pakistan stated that at least 26 civilians were killed and 46 others injured in the missile strikes. In response, cross-border shelling by Pakistani forces reportedly led to the death of at least sixteen civilians in Jammu and Kashmir. Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, along with Col. Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh, addressed the media on 07 May 2025 to brief on Operation Sindoor. During the briefing, they released visuals showing the Indian Armed Forces striking the targeted sites.
Amidst this, the media has reported (here, here, and here) about explosions in the Pakistani cities of Karachi and Lahore. In this context, a video (here, here, and here) purportedly showing a huge blast in Karachi is doing the rounds on social media. The visuals in this video are accompanied by a news anchor’s style of voice narration, in which it is said that a massive blast took place in Karachi, Pakistan. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video of a huge blast in Karachi following strikes by the Indian armed forces.
Fact: This video has existed on the internet since at least 27 March 2025. Although there are reports of blasts in Pakistan on 8 May 2025 after India carried out Operation Sindoor, this video predates these reports. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a reverse image search on the internet and found the same video uploaded on TikTok on 27 March 2025. It was uploaded by a user named Dilawar Hussain(@dantulhussain) with a caption that says ‘#SDK#Burning..’ Hussain also posted another video showing huge clouds of smoke on 28 March 2025 with a similar hashtag.
Taking this as a hint, we performed a keyword search on the internet and found that he was referring to the city of Sadiqabad in Pakistan. Through this search, we learned that a fire accident had occurred in Sadiqabaad’s Landa Bazar area on 27 March 2025. News reports about this accident can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Additionally, we also found a few videos claiming to show this fire accident in Sadiqabad on YouTube, uploaded in March 2025. The visuals in these videos are similar to the visuals in the viral video.
As for the news anchor’s style voice-over seen in the video, we could not find the source for it, but as the video predates Operation Sindoor and the explosions reported in Karachi on 8 May 2025, we can conclude that it is unrelated to these events.
To sum up, a video that predates Operation Sindoor is shared as visuals of a recent blast in Karachi, Pakistan.
