CLAIM
Amid the situation in Kashmir after the effective revocation of Article 370, a video on Facebook has gone viral, showing a large number of houses on fire, in what the post claims is Bandipora area of Kashmir.
The claim with the video says: “Indian Army Burns Kashmiri People's Houses In Bandi Pura indian occupied Kashmir and world is sleeping”.
The video, which was posted by a Facebook page called “Free Indian Occupied Kashmir”, was published on 6 August and had over 7,000 shares at the time this article was written.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The post is false, because not only is the video from 2018 but also, the fire was reportedly caused by a spark, which led to a blaze starting in one house, which then continued to spread.
WHAT WE FOUND
On going through the comments on the video, we saw many people calling out the video as fake, especially in view of the fact that internet services have been shut down in Jammu and Kashmir and the video could not have come out from there.
Moreover, on searching for the video on Facebook, we came across several other handles which had shared the same clip with the same claim, but earlier, between January and March 2019.
Therefore, operating under the assumption that the video was old, we looked for news reports about fires in Kashmir that had burned down houses, as could be seen in the video.
On searching, we came across a news report about a fire in Kashmir's Uri, in which four houses were gutted and 20 animals were charred to death. The article, by news portal Greater Kashmir, also had photos which looked like the scene in the video.
Searching for a video of the reported incident, we ran a search on YouTube with the keywords 'Uri fire four houses gutted', which led us to a video of the same incident as in the Facebook video, but from a different angle.
Looking for more information about the same incident, we came across another report by Kashmir Life which claimed that the fire was set off by a spark in the cowshed of one house, leading to the hay catching fire, which kept spreading, causing damage to four houses.
The report also stated that there was just one fire tender in the area, catering to a large number of villages in main Uri town.
Therefore, while the video is from Kashmir, the claim is false because neither is the incident recent, during the Kashmir crisis, and nor did the Indian Army set fire to the houses.
(The same video had also gone viral in 2018 with the same claim and had been debunked by Alt News.)
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