A video, that is at least two years old and available via open sources online, was telecast as an “exclusive” report by Republic TV recently to show how the Pakistan Army is hiding in civilian houses and using civilian areas for rocket attacks in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) to target the Indian territory.
The bulletin, which was uploaded by the channel’s official YouTube handle on 20 May, relies on the visuals to talk about how Pakistan is using civilians as a “shield”, but it fails to mention that the video is not a recent one.
CLAIM
The reporter when asked to apprise the viewers of the visuals, says that though he can’t identify the location, what he can say is “that it has come from top sources” and that the “channel can confirm that it is from across the Line of Control (LoC)”.
The details of the video were shared by Republic’s Senior News Editor, Shawan Sen. He mentioned that the video was “accessed” by Republic TV.
ABP News also carried an article headlined “पाक सेना की शर्मनाक हरकत का खुलासा, एबीपी न्यूज के हाथ लगा एक्सक्लूसिव वीडियो” which had the same visuals. This article too failed to mention that the visuals were old. In fact, the report mentioned that the channel has “exclusively” accessed the video.
English news channel Times Now too ran the story on 21 May without mentioning that the visuals were at least two years old.
The same news was also carried by Navbharat Times along with a snippet of the same visuals.
VISUALS AS OLD AS 2018
On taking a screenshot of one of the keyframes in the video and then conducting a reverse image search using Google, we came across the same video which was uploaded in February 2019 by a Facebook page called ‘Pakistan Breaking News’.
We also matched the frames of the visuals available online with the ones played by Republic TV.
We also found that the same visuals were uploaded in 2018 by another YouTube channel.
Clearly, the news outlets used a two year old video available via open source to show that they have "accessed" a video which shows Pakistan Army resorting to unprovoked ceasefire violations.
It must be noted that the intent of this fact-check is to show how an old video has been used by the channel as an alibi, and not to comment on the ceasefire violations which have indeed been reported along the LoC.
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