A newspaper clipping showing a photograph of Indian Air Force's (IAF) Group Captain Abhinandan Varthaman with a statement on the 2019 Pulwama attack being a planned by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has gone viral on social media.
The claim: The viral newspaper clipping carries text in Hindi, which loosely translates to –
"Abhinandan's statement. The Pulwama attack was a premeditated attack by the BJP and there was a fake attack on Pakistan. Imran Khan was helping Modi win the elections and Balakot was bombed with Imran Khan's consent."
An archive of this post can be seen here.
(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)
The claim was viral in 2019 as well. The Quint received queries for this claim's verification on its WhatsApp tipline.
(Archives of more claims on social media can be seen here, here and here.)
But?: The newspaper clipping is fabricated.
We found no evidence to back the claim that group captain Abhinandan Varthaman made any statement of this kind.
How did we find out?: We used sets of different words from the claim as keywords to look for more details.
However, we did not find any credible news reports about Abhinandan making any statement about the Balakot strike in 2019.
A reverse image search on the viral clipping, too did not yield any credible results of such a statement.
Video statements by Abhinandan: We looked for videos of Abhinandan after he was held captive by the Pakistani Army in 2019.
We came across two videos of Abhinandan, the first of which was his interrogation by Pakistani Army personnel uploaded on Dawn News' verified YouTube channel.
In this video, he identified himself and spoke about his treatment by the officers of the Pakistan Army, calling them "thorough gentlemen."
He goes on to respond to certain questions the Pakistani Army's personnel raised, while evading others pertaining to his aircraft and mission.
We also came across another video released by the government of Pakistan, where Abhinandan spoke about the series of incidents that led to him being under the Pakistani Army's custody.
Conclusion: There is no evidence to back the claim that Group Commander (formerly Wing Commander) Abhinandan Varthaman made any statements about the Pulwama attack being premeditated or the Balakot strike being a fake attack on Pakistan.
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