Old and unrelated photos are falsely attributed to the Iranian President’s helicopter crash - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
May 22, 2024
Update (22 May 2024):
Another couple of videos (here and here) have been circulating on social media claiming to show the footage of the Iran President’s Helicopter crash. Let’s verify the authenticity of these videos.
Video 1:
Contrary to the claim, we found that the video has existed on the internet since 2016 and has nothing to do with the Helicopter crash of Iran President Ebrahim Riasi. Through a reverse image search on a few of the viral video’s keyframes, we found news reports (here, here and here) from 2016 about the viral video. As per the reports, the video shows a Turkish helicopter shot down by the Kurdish fighters.
Video 2:
A reverse image search of the keyframes extracted from the viral video led us to the same video uploaded on YouTube in August 2022, titled “Helicopter crash in Panama with a presidential candidate on board. All survived #panama.” Further media reports (here and here) from August 2022 confirmed that the video shows a helicopter carrying Panamanian presidential candidate Dimitri Flores and six other people, crashed in a mountainous area in western Panama. All of them were rescued from the accident.
Published (21 May 2024):
After the news of the fatal helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and a few officials broke the internet, social media was flooded with photos (here, here, and here) claiming to be from the crash site. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Visuals of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s helicopter crash site.
Fact: Exept for one photo, which is realsed by the Iranian state media labeling it as the photo taken at the crash site, all the other photos shared in this post actually show the crash site of a police training plane that killed two people in Iran’s Mazandaran province back in April 2020. Hence, the claim made in the post is Misleading.
To check the veracity of the viral claim, we performed a reverse image search on each of these photos individually. Through this search, we found that the viral photos are old and unrelated except for one photo (here and here), which belongs to the actual crash site of the Iran President’s helicopter.
As per the news reports from April 2020 (here, here, and here), an Iranian police training plane crash-landed in the forests of Mazandaran province’s Salmanshahr. This plane was flying from Bisheh Kolah to the capital city of Iran, Tehran.
Iranian Red Crescent Society, a Non-Governmental Humanitarian Organisation, also posted photos of this crash on ‘X’ in April 2020. This makes it clear that visuals of a plane crash from April 2020 are falsely shared as the photos of the helicopter crash site of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
#سقوط_هواپیما در مازندران/خلبان و کمک خلبان جان‌باختند
رییس سازمان امدادونجات:
یک فروند هواپیما که از بیشه کلاه به مقصد تهران در حال پرواز بوده است بر اساس گزارش مردمی و نهادهای نظامی در ساعت ۱۳:۰۰ UTC، حوالی #متل‌قو (سلمان شهر) سقوط کرد
جزییات بیشترhttps://t.co/7tFY8jxgGM pic.twitter.com/Owei5h4bB7
To sum up, old and unrelated photos of a plane crash are falsely shared as visuals from the Iranian President’s helicopter crash site.