A short, graphic video of a suicide bombing outside the gates of a building in Syria is being shared on social media with a claim that a suicide bomber blew himself up in front of the presidential palace in Damascus.
However, we found that the clip is actually from Syria's port city of Tartus, where a man grabbed his lawyer outside a courthouse and blew both of them up over a familial dispute.
CLAIM
The video is being shared with different claims in Hindi and English. The English claim being circulated with the video places the incident outside the president's residence in Damascus, while the one in Hindi calls it an act of terrorism and adds, 'look at the person who has been trained as per a religion'.
An archived version of this tweet can be seen here.
(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
Using InVID to fragment the video into multiple keyframes, we ran reverse image searches on the stills obtained.
The results led us to a tweet by user 'Marina', which noted that two people were killed in a bomb explosion over a familial matter outside a courthouse in Tartus.
A tweet noted the location of the incident.
(Photo: Twitter/Screenshot)
Using keywords like "Tartus court suicide bombing" (تفجير انتحاري في محكمة طرطوس) in Arabic, we found news reports about the incident.
As per a report by Sky News Arabia, the incident in the video shows a man called Yahya H, who detonated a bomb on a Melhem, a lawyer outside the Palace of Justice in Tartus, Syria on Thursday, 23 September.
The report notes that Yahya did so due to family disputes between him and the lawyer and that the act caused three deaths and left 11 people injured.
Other reports by RT and Al Jazeera add that the bomb was a hand grenade and that a number of those injured were policemen and officers.
Further, the Presidential Palace of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in Damascus, while the incident happened in Tartus, which is nearly 253 km away.
Distance between Tartus and Damascus nearly 253 km.
(Source: Google Maps)
Evidently, the graphic video does not show a bombing outside the Syrian president's residence in Damascus and is not an act of terrorism. The clip shows a man carrying out a suicide bombing outside a court in Tartus, a Syrian port city, due to a familial dispute.
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