An image is being shared on social media claiming it as recent visuals of aeroplane trafficking from Afghanistan to Pakistan. This post claim that the incident took place recently after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Let’s verify the claim made in the post.
Claim: Photo of Afghanistan trafficking aeroplanes to Pakistan.
Fact: This post shared an old picture of the ‘Behsud Foundation’ transporting a crashed Afghan military plane from Daikundi province in 2018. This crash took place at Nili Airport in October 2017. The photo shared in the post is an old one and has nothing to do with the Taliban and Pakistan. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
On reverse image search of the photo shared in the post, a similar photo was found in a Facebook post by ‘Behsud Foundation’ on 30 July 2018. The other images shared in the post clearly indicate that the aircraft was already damaged or crash-landed.
On observing carefully, we could see the registration number ‘YA12303’ on the plane. Using these keywords, we found the details of this crashed airplane on the Aviation Safety Network (ASN) website. According to the information provided on the ‘ASN’ website, on 03 October 2017, a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan operated by the Afghan Air Force had crash-landed at Nili Airport, Daikundi Province, Afghanistan. Ehsanullah Amiri, an Afghanistan-based journalist had reported this incident through a tweet on 03 October 2017.
On 03 October 2017, the ‘Tolo News’ website published an article reporting this military aircraft crash at Nili Airport in Daikundi Province. This article reported that an Afghan army plane made a hard landing in Daikundi soon after dropping off the new provisional governor, Mahmoud Baligh. From all these pieces of evidence, it can be concluded that the image shared in the post is old which was shot before Taliban rule in Afghanistan.
To sum it up, an unrelated old photo is being shared as visuals of Taliban trafficking Airplanes to Pakistan.
