A video is being shared on social media claiming it to be the execution video of a Pakistani soldier captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Let’s verify the details of this video.
Claim: Visuals of a recent incident where the Taliban executed a captive Pakistani soldier.
Fact: This video is from 2015, and reportedly the Pakistani Taliban hanged a Pakistani ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) officer. They have allegedly performed this act in retaliation of the killing of Militants by Pakistan. Hence the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
We performed a keyword search on Google regarding the execution of a Pakistani officer by the Taliban. This led us to a few news reports (here and here) from 2015 which reported an execution of an ISI officer by the Pakistani Taliban. These news reports have credited Reuters as their source. We then looked for the news report published by Reuters and found that it was published in October 2015, in which they reported that ‘The Pakistani Taliban has hanged a military intelligence officer in retaliation for recent executions of militants by Pakistan, the militant Islamist group said in videos released on Sunday‘. Reuters described the visuals of those videos in their article. The description of the second video matches the viral video.
As per the report, the person who lost his life in the video is identified as Bashir Ahmad Khan, who was ‘originally from the 19th army air defence unit and later recruited by Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence.’ Further, to confirm if the viral video belongs to the same incident, we looked for more evidence on the internet by searching it with relevant keywords, including the name of Bashir Ahmad Khan. This led us to a tweet from 2015, which contains an image matching the viral video’s visuals and two more images which match the description of the same execution that Reuters reported. Although Reuters could not confirm the veracity of the video, it is clear that the video is old and is not of a recent alleged execution of a Pakistani Soldier by the Taliban as claimed by the viral post.
In summary, an old video of Pakistani Taliban executing an ISI officer is shared as a recent incident.
