Ten years old video of air crash in Afghanistan shared as Yeti Airlines crash in Nepal

A Yeti Airlines flight from Kathmandu crashed before landing in the tourist city of Pokhara on January 15, killing 72 people aboard including 68 passengers and four crew members. Following the jet accident, social media users circulated old photographs and videos claiming to show the plane crash.

A nearly 10-year-old video purportedly showing the plane crash was circulated on Twitter.

On January 15, 2023, a Twitter user named @abusahma02 released an 18-second video with the hashtags #pokharaplanecrash and #pokharaairport. The video opens with a moving bus on the highway. An airplane then appears. It soon comes crashing down and erupts in flames. At the end of the video, there is smoke.

“Clear footage of passenger plane crashes in Nepal with seventy-two people on board. The Yeti Airlines was heading from Kathmandu to Pokhara. Five Indians were in the plane,” the user captioned the video. The individual identified himself as a journalist.

Similarly, a Twitter user named @chandan48430579 also posted the same video on January 15 claiming that it showed the 2023 crash in Pokhara.

Nepal Check found that the video is almost 10 years old.

We used InVid, a video verification tool, to convert the video into keyframes or images. We used Google reverse image search to find the original video. We found a news report published in The Guardian on May 1, 2013. According to the news, the footage shows a plane crash at Afghanistan’s Bagram airbase in 2013. 

A screenshot of a video report published in The Guardian on May 1, 2013

We searched The Guardian website using keywords to find out the exact date of the crash. We found that the video shows the American Boeing 747 cargo plane had crashed on April 29, 2013 in Afghanistan. The full 53-second video opens with a bus moving on a road. The plane then arrives, but it crashes into the earth, bursting into flames and smoke. 

The cargo plane crashed shortly after taking off from Bagram Air Base, killing all seven crew members, according to Associated Press. The Dubai-bound plane was operated by the National Air Cargo Group Inc, a US-based transportation company. 

The videos of the plane crash posted on Twitter show a decade-old plane crash in Afghanistan, not the 2023 crash of Yeti Airlines plane in Nepal.

It was actually footage of a plane crash that occurred in Afghanistan in 2013.

ClaimClaimed byNepal Check
A video shows Yeti Airlines’ plane crash on January 15 in Pokhara.Twitter usersFalse
Nepal Check verdict after fact checking a viral video on Twitter claiming it showed the January 15 plane crash in the Nepali tourist town of Pokhara. 

This article is written by

Deepak Adhikari

Deepak Adhikari is the editor of Nepal Check. Over the last two decades, he has worked as a correspondent for international media and national publications in Nepal. His work has appeared in major international publications such as New York Times, The Guardian, Time, Al Jazeera, Nikkei Asia.