On 11 March 2025, a train(Jaffar Express) in Pakistan was halted and hijacked (here, here, and here) by the insurgents of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA). They reportedly blew up the railway track while the train was on its way from Quetta to Peshawar and killed at least six military personnel (here). Local media reports indicate at least 27 terrorists who hijacked the train were killed by the security forces and that they rescued 155 passengers. Amidst this, a video has gone viral (here, here, here, and here) on social media which claims to show the visuals of the hijacked train. Media organizations like ABP Live have also used a screenshot from this video in their report related to this incident.
Claim: Video of the Jaffar Express train hijacked by Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) in Pakistan on 11 March 2025.
Fact: This is an old video available online, at least from April 2022, and is unrelated to the March 2025 hijack of the Jaffar Express in Pakistan. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
While verifying the authenticity of this video, we came across a few comments identifying this as an old video. We also found an X post made by a user named Mission Takmeel, who shared this video along with the news about the Jaffar Express hijack incident. Mission Takmeel states in a comment under this post that it is an old video and he shared it for representational purposes.
Another user on X named Fear Fighter has posted a longer version of this video of the same video under a post with the viral video and said it was an old video.
Taking this as a cue, we performed a keyword search and found an X post (archive link) containing the viral video. This was posted on 15 April 2022 with a text that reads, ‘BLA has released footage of an IED attack on Train carrying FC(Frontier Corps) near Sibbi, Balochistan.’
We then performed another keyword search to learn more about this and found a few news reports (here, here, and here) from March 2022 about an IED blast incident that happened on 15 March 2022 in the Sibi district of Pakistan.
It was reported that the BLA had taken responsibility for this blast. However, these news reports did not contain the visuals seen in the video posted on April 2022. Hence, we could not independently confirm if the video is related to this incident.
Additionally, we also found the visuals seen in the viral video in a video story posted by ‘News9 Plus’ on X on 12 September 2022. At around the 0:05 mark in this video, we can see the visual from the viral video. All of this evidence makes it clear that the viral video predates the 11 March 2025 hijack of the Jaffar Express in Pakistan and is unrelated to it.
To sum up, an old video from 2022 is falsely being shared as visuals of the March 2025 Pakistan train hijack incident.
