A video of flash floods in the Swat Valley of Pakistan in 2020 is being falsely shared on social media as recent floods in Kedarnath, India. The video shows a river overflowing its banks and flooding a road and several buildings. It was originally shared on Twitter on July 14, 2020, by a Pakistani journalist. The video has been shared on Facebook and Twitter with captions that claim it shows the recent floods in Kedarnath. However, there is no evidence to support these claims. The video has been geotagged to the Swat Valley, and there have been no reports of major flooding in Kedarnath in recent months.
This is not the first time that an old video has been falsely shared as recent footage of a natural disaster in India. In 2021, a video of a landslide in Uttarakhand was falsely shared as recent footage of the floods in Amarnath.
When the India TV Fact Check team investigated this claim, it came to light that this video is not from Kedarnath.
Claim
A Facebook page named 'Satsang-satsang-mythological stories-meditation-devotion-customs and scientific basis'. A user named Shantilal Prajapat shared a video on this page. This video was posted about six days ago.
India TV did a fact check
When we found this video, we went through it carefully. Then started searching for a screenshot of this video on Google. We found some YouTube videos in the Google search results. These videos were of the floods in the Swat Valley. We clicked on one of these videos and started watching it closely. This video was uploaded on the YouTube channel of a journalist named Sherin Zada. The video was shared on this channel on September 1, 2020. It is written in the title and description of this video that it is about the terrible flood on the Swat River. Shereen Zada has told us in this report how much damage has been caused by this flood in Bahrain and the Madyan areas of Pakistan. What large-scale devastation has been caused by this spate in the Swat River. Swat is a district in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan and a beautiful valley surrounded by mountains. The river passing through here is called the Swat River. Swat Valley is also known as the Switzerland of Pakistan.
The footage shown by journalist Shereen Zada in the video also featured the clip that appears in our viral video. This is the video of the same place in Swat Valley that is being told about Kedarnath in the viral video. After this, apart from YouTube videos, we also searched for some news reports about the floods in Swat Valley. During this, we found a news website named Aushimalay. A report titled "Communication during Disasters in Indigenous Communities in Swat" is published on this website. This is also from October 2020. In this report, during the floods in the Swat Valley in the year 2020, it has been explained in detail how the communities there, without any modern telecommunication medium, sent messages to each other far and wide. The photo used in this report also matches exactly one of the keyframes of our viral video.
After this, when we searched further, we found another video of the flood in the Swat River. This video was uploaded on a YouTube channel named 'Total Info'. This video was uploaded on September 2, 2020. Its title reads, 'Aerial view of heavy flood in Swat, Pakistan Flood 2020.' It is clear that this video is also from the Swat Valley of Pakistan. This video also shows the flood scene from another angle at the same place, which was seen in our viral video on Facebook and Shereen Zada's YouTube video. It is clear from this that all these videos are of the floods in Pakistan's Swat Valley in the year 2020, and the video that went viral on Facebook as Kedarnath is misleading.
India TV's fact check found a video shared on Facebook as 'Kedarnath flood scene to be misleading. The viral video has nothing to do with Kedarnath. This video is actually of the terrible floods in the Swat Valley of Pakistan in September 2020.
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