Khujand Restaurant Fire Misrepresented as Iran-Israel Missile Strike
Amid the Iran-Israel conflict, a narrative is being circulated on social media, primarily by Indian handles, that shows Iran having the upper hand in the conflict and Israel having suffered heavy losses. A lot of old and AI generated videos are being shared to fuel this narrative. One such video that is going viral shows a massive fire in a structure. This video is being shared with the claim that Iran blew up Israel’s Home Ministry building with a missile today.
Sharing the video, IP Singh wrote, “Iran today blew up Israel’s Home Ministry building with a missile.” (archived link)
Sadaf Afreen stated, “Iran’s claim-Iran fired a missile at Israel’s interior ministry and turned it into smoke!” (archived link)
Monika Singh claimed, “Iran Says “Good Morning” to Israel: Blows Up Israeli Interior Ministry Building.” (archived link)
This video was also shared by other handles like Karishma Aziz (archived link), Delip Mandal (archived link), Krishna Kant (archived link), Gaza Middle East update (archived link), Amit Pandey (archived link), and Sheetal Yadav (archived link).
Also Read: AI-Generated Explosion Video Falsely Shared as Massive Blast in Israel
In our fact check research, we extracted different keyframes from this viral video and ran a reverse image search. During this, we found a same video posted on TikTok by @kkhujandd.
The video’s caption, after translation from Tajik, says, “During the fire in the Temurmalik restaurant in the city of Khujand, dozens of young people helped to take out tables, chairs and other valuable items. Alas, the restaurant completely burned down! All residents are respectfully requested to be careful of fire, follow safety rules and definitely call 101 in case of fire.”
This gave us clues that the video might be from the city of Khujand in Tajikistan. Next, we searched for some related keywords in Tajik, and found an Instagram post posted by @oilatj on June20.
Here, we found a similar video and when we compared its visuals, it turned out to be the same video.
We translated the caption from Tajik and found that it says the video is from fire at the Yakasaroy VIP restaurant in Khujand. The restaurant is located on the left bank of the Syr Darya, near the Sugdiyon hotel, and was previously known as Temurmalik. Since October of this year, this institution has changed its name to Yakasaroy VIP.
Apart from this, when we searched the location of this restaurant on Google Maps, we found some pictures there. When we compared the visuals seen in the viral video and the images found on Google Maps, we found some similar visuals. We saw that things like pedestrian overpass, aerial tramway and colonnade are same in both the visuals, which makes it clear that the viral video is from Tajikistan, not Israel.
In conclusion, the viral video of a fire at the Yakasaroy VIP restaurant in Khujand, Tajikistan is being falsely shared as an Iranian missile attack on the Israeli Home Ministry.
| Claim | Iran blew up Israel’s Home Ministry with a missile. |
| Claimed by | IP Singh, Sadaf Afreen, Monika Singh, Sheetal Yadav, Karishma Aziz and others |
| Fact Check | This video is from Tajikistan, where a major fire broke out at the Yakasaroy VIP restaurant located in Khujand on June 20. |
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