In the context of Malawi’s vice-president, Saulos Chilima, along with nine others losing their lives in a plane crash (here and here), a photo (here, here and here) allegedly showing the wreckage of this crash is doing the rounds on social media. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: This photo shows the wreckage of the plane that crashed, leading to the death of the Malawi vice-president Saulos Chilima and nine others.
Fact: This is an old photo from September 2020 that shows the crash site of a Ukrainian military plane, not the wreckage of Chilima’s plane. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
Firstly, we searched Malawi’s official website and the social media handles (here and here), to see if we could find the viral photo linking it to the plane crash carrying vice-president Saulos Chilima and others. This search yielded no results. Further, none of the news reports (here, here, and here) that carried the photos of the plane crash contained this particular photo.
Then, we performed a reverse image search to learn more about the photo and found it on Alamy, a stock photo website. According to the photo’s description, it was taken on 26 September 2020. It shows the crash site of an ‘An-26’ Ukrainian military plane in Chuguev, Kharkiv region, Ukraine.
Reportedly (here, here, and here), this plane crash took the lives of 26 people.
To sum up, an old and unrelated photo falsely shared as visuals of the Malawi vice-president’s plane wreckage.
