More unrelated clips go viral as ‘state of Karachi’ after Operation Sindoor
Even as as tensions escalate between India and Pakistan following military strikes between the two countries, unverified images and videos claiming to be related to the conflict have flooded social media. One such video of a purported blast is being shared where commentary in the background claims that the visuals were from a bomb blast in the port city of Karachi, the capital city of the province of Sindh in Pakistan.
A fortnight after a terrorist attack in Pahalgam had killed 26 people, Indian Armed Forces in the early hours of May 7 launched Operation Sindoor, hitting nine sites in Pakistan and PoK from where attacks against India had been planned and directed. The Union Ministry of Defence described the action as “focused, measured and non-escalatory in nature”, with no Pakistani military facilities having been targeted. Late on May 7, reports came in of heavy mortar shelling by Pakistan on forward villages along the Line of Control in Poonch and Rajouri areas of Jammu and Kashmir killing at least 16 civilians. They also attempted to engage a number of military targets in northern and western India including in Awantipura, Srinagar, Jammu, Pathankot and Amritsar, among other places, using drones and missiles. These were neutralised by India’s integrated counter UAS grid and air defence systems. Subsequently, Indian armed forces targeted air defence radars and systems at a number of locations in Pakistan in a proportionate response, and neutralized the air defence system in Lahore.
Verified X handle @Mahaveer_VJ tweeted the video of the blast and sarcastically wrote, ‘Karachi has become a biscuit’. The tweet garnered close to 550,000 views. (Archive)
Several X accounts consequently used the ‘copypasta’ technique, wherein they copied the same caption and amplified the video. (Archives- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
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The video is also viral on Facebook.
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Fact Check
The video in question has four different clips. Below are four discernible screenshots from each clip.
Upon a reverse image search of the first image, we found that the clip had been posted on Facebook by a Pakistani user on March 28. The caption, written in Urdu, translates to ‘A fire broke out in the market’. We found the same video on YouTube, in a March 27 video, with the title ‘A fire broke out in Sadiqabad Landa’ written in Urdu.
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According to a news report on the Aaj TV website, the fire had erupted in Sadiqabad Landa bazaar and spread to an empty railway coach. Sadiqabad is the Capital of Sadiqabad Tehsil in Rahim Yar Khan District in Punjab province of Pakistan.
The second image is from a clip that shows a massive explosion happening in a city as the camera pans sideways, towards what is seemingly a religious structure. We ran the keyframes through Google reverse image search and were not able to ascertain the origin of the video. Even when we ran the keyframe featuring the monument, we got no results, which was unusual, given that it appeared to be a major landmark. All of this suggests the clip may be AI-generated.
We observed a few anomalies when we observed closely. The monument’s ground floor extends to the right, which has several irregularly shaped arches (circled in red). Moreover, the arches seen in the main building of the monument are also asymmetrical. Such anomalies are often a regular feature of AI-generated images.
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Alt News spoke with Areeba Fatima, investigative reporter and senior fact checker at Pakistan-based fact-checking organisation Soch Videos. She told us, “There is no such mosque in Karachi, this clip looks AI-generated.”
The third image is also from March. TikTok user aataaullahbairnd41 had uploaded the same video on March 19 with crying emojis. The user uploaded a similar video, from the same incident, on his TikTok account on the same day.
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The fourth image is not from Pakistan. The clip is from a massive fire that broke out at the Blue Light Market in Adum, Kumasi, Ghana, on March 21, 2025, causing significant damage and destruction. The fire originated in a storey building adjacent to Hello FM and quickly spread, impacting multiple shops within the market. Firefighters battled the blaze for over 15 hours, but hundreds of shops were ultimately destroyed.
Below is a comparison between the viral clip and a video from the aftermath of the incident on March 22.
Hence, a compilation of unrelated clips is viral on social media. Social media users falsely claim that it is the state of Karachi after India launched Operation Sindoor.
The post More unrelated clips go viral as ‘state of Karachi’ after Operation Sindoor appeared first on Alt News.
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