A Twitter account with more than 150 thousand followers shared a post on Aug 24, 2022, captioned “Breaking news! An enemy airplane which was about to cross the Ethiopian airspace was shot down by the Ethiopian air force.”
By the time this article is published the post had more than a thousand reactions and was retweeted more than 300 times.
However, HaqCheck inspected the image and rendered it False.
The press release by the Tigray Army’s military command on Aug 17, 2022, stated that “on August 15, 2022, the Ethiopian National Defense Force, which claims to have built an impregnable fortress in Western Tigray, bombarded Tigray Army forces around Dedebit for an hour with heavy artilleries and tanks.”
The spokesperson of TPLF Getachew Reda said that the Federal Government [Abiy’s administration] had opened an attack on the southern front of Tigray, and the Amhara special forces and Fano militias from Wollo also participated in the offensive. He also added that the Tigray defense forces are defending their territory.
Later, on Aug 24, 2022, Major general Tesfaye Ayalew said that the Ethiopian Air Force shot down an Airplane carrying weapons for TPLF.
On the contrary, TPLF denied the claim that the Ethiopian Air Force shot down a plane.
HaqCheck assessed the image and spotted it on a YouTube channel called AERO press BG which has more than two thousand subscribers, captioned, “National Air Cargo’s Boeing 747-400 freighter crash in Afghanistan” on Apr 30, 2013. The video got more than 3 million views.
The video of the incident also appeared on CNN aired on May 2, 2013. It was reported in the news that, “a civilian cargo plane crash killed seven Americans. The moment after taking off from Bagram airbase in Afghanistan six of the Americans on board were from Michigan and one from Kentucky. An American contractor nearby filmed the incident.”
Besides finding the image in the video HaqCheck made a comparison between the video and the image.
The image on Twitter
Footages detected inside the video
The Twitter post cropped out an image from the video of the cargo crash accident and employed it to accompany its claim. This Twitter account shared an image that was also cropped out from this video on Mar 16, 2022, with a claim that “an Antonov plane was shot down by an Eritrean anti-aircraft.”
Even though there are claims from the government that the Ethiopian Air force shot down an Airplane intruding into the Ethiopian Airspace, the image used by the Twitter account is wrong.
Therefore, HaqCheck inspected the post and rendered it False.
