A collage with the images of collapsed buildings is being shared on social media claiming it as the visuals of the recent earthquake that hit Tajikistan. An earthquake of magnitude 6.3 on the Richter scale hit Tajikistan on 12 February 2021. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photos of massive destruction caused by the earthquake in Tajikistan.
Fact: The first photo shared in the post is from the 2018 earthquake that hit Sicily city in Italy. The other photo shows a collapsed building in the 2020 earthquake hit Elazig city in Eastern Turkey. These photos have nothing to do with the recent earthquake that hit Tajikistan. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Image-1:
On reverse image search of the photo shared in the post, a similar photo was found in a news article published on 27 December 2018. This article reported it as the visuals of collapsed buildings in the earthquake hit Sicily region in Italy. Sharing a similar photo, ‘BBC’ published an article on earthquake hit Sicily region. In the article, it is reported that a 4.8-magnitude earthquake hit Sicily near Europe’s most active volcano, Mount Etna. The news articles published on the 2018 Sicily earthquake can be read here and here.
Image-2:
On reverse image search of the photo shared in the post, we found a similar photo in a news article published on 24 January 2020. This article reported it as the visual of a collapsed building after a massive earthquake of magnitude 6.8 hit the Elazig province in Eastern Turkey. A similar visual is found in the ‘CNN’ article published on massive destruction caused by the earthquake in Eastern Turkey. The news articles published on this incident can be read here and here.
To sum it up, old photos from different earthquake hit cities are shared as the recent photos from earthquake hit Tajikistan.
