A Twitter account with more than 110 thousand followers shared a picture on Mar 16, 2022, captioned “Antonov plane that carries a weapon from Sudan across Eritrea to Tigray was shot down by an Eritrean anti-aircraft”
By the time this article was published the post had more than 660 reactions and was retweeted more than 190 times.
Nevertheless, HaqCheck inspected the image and rendered it False.
Following the war between the Federal government and TPLF, many Tigrayan refugees fled to Sudan.
On Nov 14, 2020, there are claims that at least three rockets were fired at Eritrea’s capital from Tigray. Later on, Mar 23, 2021, PM Abiy Ahmed admits that the Eritrean soldiers entered Tigray.
On Dec 3, 2021, Sudan’s Sovereign Council head Abdel Fattah al-Burhan said Khartoum does not support the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia.
It is with the supposed connection Sudan would have with Ethiopia during the time of war that this post is crafted.
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.
Boeing 747-400 is a wide-body airline produced by Boeing Commercial Airplanes which is an advanced variant of the initial Boeing 747. The First 747-400 was rolled out on Jan 26, 1988, and made its maiden flight on Apr 29, 1988. According to Wikipedia, the plane is still on service mainly for different cargo uses.
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.”
The Twitter post cropped out an image from the video of the cargo crash accident and employed it to accompany its claim.
HaqCheck inspected the image used to support the claim and proved it wrong, to finally render it False.
