A Facebook page with more than 130 thousand followers shared a post on Sep 14, 2022, captioned, “ Two tanks were destroyed by an air raid at Alamata which were being loaded to Kobo.”
By the time this article is published the post had more than 700 reactions and was shared more than 25 times.
However, HaqCheck inspected the image and rendered it False.
The war between the Tigray people liberation front (TPLF) and the Federal government broke out on Nov 2020 after TPLF attacked the northern command settled in Tigray.
After a nine-month cease-fire for a humanitarian truce, the fighting between the Federal government and TPLF resumes on August 24, 2022. Both sides blamed one another for the provocation of the conflict that led to the eruption of the engagement anew.
On Sep 13, 2022, a Facebook page with more than 600 thousand followers with the name Dimtsi Weyane shared a post claiming that the federal government conducted an airstrike on Dimtsi Weyane Tv station.
Later, on Sep 14, 2022, Getachew Reda, the spokesperson of TPLF shared a tweet that reads “Abiy Ahmed’s drones a few minutes ago attacked a residential area in Mekelle killing and wounding innocent civilians. No desperate and cowardly act could reverse the regime’s battlefield losses.”
In an effort of confirming the correctness of the claim, HaqCheck found out that the image was first posted on Mar 6, 2022, on a website called suspilen.media which mostly published its articles in the Ukrainian language.
The image was found in an article titled “Fighters of the Transcarpathian Brigade destroyed a Russian BMP and captured a Russian soldier”. The article had images showing destroyed tanks and a captured soldier.
On Feb 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014. The invasion caused Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II, with around 7.3 million Ukrainians fleeing the country and a third of the population displaced.
Even though there are several claims that the federal government is conducting airstrikes in Tigray and is employing drones in the war, the image used by the Facebook account to support the claim is wrong.
Therefore HaqCheck inspected the image and rendered it False.
