BBC Didn’t Identify Flydubai Attacker as an Indian Passenger, Clip Is Al-Altered

The video was manipulated using AI and the details of the claim are false.

An AI-altered video claiming to show a BBC report about the flydubai attacker being an Indian national named Raghav Menon has gone viral on social media.

(Source: Facebook/Altered by The Quint)

A video which purportedly shows a BBC report about the recent attack on the Flydubai flight FZ1073 which was diverted to Saudi Arabia after a cockpit altercation is being widely shared on social media.

• In the video, the anchor identifies the attacker as a passenger, claiming that he was an Indian national named Raghav Menon.

• The text being shared with this video noted that Parag Jain, the Secretary of the Research and Analysis Wing of India (R&AW) and Ajit Doval, the National Security Advisor (NSA) of India had met with Israeli intelligence agency Mossad to send Menon on a covert operation in order to implicate Arab states for the attack.

An archived version of this post can be seen here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

(Archives of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, and here.)

Is it true?: No, the claim is false and the video being shared with it was altered using AI.

How did we find out the truth?: We went through BBC News' YouTube channel to look for the video in question.

• There, we found that the report featuring the same journalist, which was about OpenAI's halting or stopping the rollout of the new model of ChatGPT, called the GPT-6.1 Astra system, after concerns over safety.

Neither did this report mention the Flydubai incident, nor did any of their reports on the attack identify the attacker as a passenger or an Indian national.

• We then ran a reverse image search on the photos of the man who was featured in the claim.

• The search led us to stock image website Shutterstock, where the same image was shared in 2018 as one of an Indian man in a three-piece suit.

The man's photo was found on a stock photo website.

(Source: Shutterstock)

• While we could not find the source of the second image, it is clear that it shows the same man as the one seen in the stock photo.

• Widespread news coverage of the incident, including reports by the BBC, confirmed that the co-pilot, who has now been identified as an Omani national, was the attacker, and not a passenger, as claimed.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu identified the attacker as an Omani national.

(Source: BBC News/Altered by The Quint)

• These details confirm that the claim made in the text shared with the video, about Indian and Israeli intelligence attempting to create a false flag operation with this specific incident are also baseless.

• Additionally, we came across an X post by BBC Verify's Shayan Sardarizadeh, who stated that the "fake video" featured AI-generated audio and that the "claim presented in the video is baseless" and that the BBC had not put out such a report.

• We then ran the video through Hive Moderation's AI-generated content detection tool confirmed that the video carried AI-generated speech.

The video carries AI-generated speech.

(Source: Hive Moderation/Screenshot)

• To check which tool had been used to generate or manipulate this video, we ran checks on multiple platforms.

• Meta's AI identification website confirmed that its tools were used to alter the video using AI, and mentioned that it was altered on 1 October.

The video was created on 1 October.

(Source: Meta AI/Screenshot)

Conclusion: An AI-altered video is being shared to falsely claim that the BBC identified that attacker in the Flydubai case as an Indian passenger named Raghav Menon.

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