Old Photos from Eastern Turkey shared as recent pictures of earthquake hit Afghanistan - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
February 15, 2021
A collage with images of collapsed buildings is being shared on social media claiming it as the pictures of the massive destruction caused by the earthquake in Afghanistan. On 12 February 2021, an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 on the Richter scale hit the Fayzabad city in Afghanistan. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photos of the massive destruction caused by an earthquake in Afghanistan.
Fact: The photos shared in the post show the massive destruction caused by the earthquake in Eastern Turkey on 24 January 2020. These photos have nothing to do with the recent earthquake in Afghanistan. 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 an article published by ‘The New Indian Express’ on 25 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. Sharing the same photo, several news websites published articles on the earthquake that hit Elazig city in Eastern Turkey. They can be seen here, here, and here. According to these news reports, a powerful earthquake hit Elazig on 24 January 2020.
Image-2:
On reverse image search of the photo shared in the post, we found a similar photo in an article published by ‘Voa’ news website on 24 January 2020. In the article, it is mentioned as a visual of the massive destruction caused by an earthquake in Eastern Turkey. The news articles that published the same photo can be seen here, here, and here.
Image-3:
A similar visual was found in an article published by ‘Global news’ website. In the article, it is reported as the visual from the earthquake that hit Eastern Turkey. News articles sharing similar photo can be seen here and here.
From all these pieces of evidence, it is concluded that the photos shared in the post are related to the earthquake hit Eastern Turkey in January 2020.
To sum it up, 2020 photos from earthquake hit Eastern Turkey are shared as the recent pictures from earthquake hit Afghanistan.