GovernmentWrong Caption

Indian Air force Helicopter wasn’t shot down by Nepal as they claimed.

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A video of a helicopter being shot down is getting viral on all social media platforms with the following message :

“Today, Indian air forces had crossed the border to conduct airstrikes on the Nepal territories. India contacted an airstrike in Belahiya. In the resulting, Nepal shot down one Indian HAL Rudra and captured one Indian pilot.”

Claim: The video claims to be of an Indian air force helicopter that crossed the border to conduct airstrikes on the Nepal territories and it was shot down by Nepal forces and one Indian pilot was captured.

Twitter

A Nepalese twitter handle shared the same video which was later on deleted by the user. The tweet fetched 1,500  retweets and over 50,000 views.

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Few more twitter handles shared the same viral video with the same text content.

Youtube

We also found a YouTube news video claiming the same incident of an Indian Air Force chopper being shot down by the Nepali forces and one pilot being captured by the forces.

Truth

This a eight year old video dated 17th October 2012, A Syrian Army helicopter shot by terrorists.

During the course of our investigation, we use keyframes from this video and used them in google reverse image search. It led us to a twitter handle of Hugo Kaaman who shared the video with the following text “A Syrian Air Force (SyAAF) helicopter explodes mid-air as it descends after being struck by opposition anti-aircraft fire above Idlib countryside on October 17, 2012. One of the craziest and most iconic videos from the entire Syrian Civil War”.

The archived version of the tweet can be accessed with the following link http://archive.is/N2oTj

With the help of the syrian war clue we performed another google keyword search and we found the following results.

As per the reporting of The Telegraph, “Rebels downed a helicopter on Wednesday as troops fought to take back a key Syrian town, a watchdog said, as international peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned the conflict risks setting the region ablaze. Fighting for control of the Damascus-Aleppo highway raged around the northwestern town of Maaret al-Numan even as Brahimi appeared to have won tentative support for a ceasefire proposal.”

Even news agency Reuters also mentioned this incident in one of its stories.

This article can be accessed by using the following link https://www.reuters.com/article/syria-crisis-weapons/rebels-forcing-syrian-jets-to-bomb-from-high-altitude-france-idUSL5E8LH6RE20121017

Thus the social media claim that an Indian Air Force helicopter Rudra was shot down by Nepal and a pilot was captured was found to be false in our investigation. The video dates back to Syria from 2012.


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Mohd Nadeem Siddiqui

Author of 2 books and a former researcher on Homeland, Defence and National Security for last 10 years.Independent Fact Checker and busting fake news.