CLAIMAmid growing military tensions between India and China in Ladakh region, screengrab of a
Facebook post is being circulated on WhatsApp. The Facebook post contains three photos shared with a caption that claims that China has attacked India and injured 158 of our soldiers.
Two of these photos show military vehicles that have caught fire, while the third photo shows some armymen carrying injured soldiers.
Times Fact Check also received this message as a forward from a reader on its WhatsApp number. The reader wanted to know its authenticity.
TRUTHThe photos are old and have been shared with the same claim earlier.
VERIFICATION AND METHODOLOGYWe cropped and ran reverse-image search on all three photos to trace its source.
Image 1 and 2
We found a YouTube video uploaded to channel ‘Talk Shows Central’ on July 17, 2017.
Titled ‘Chinese cross border rocket attack kills 158 Indian soldiers - Dunya News’, the video carries a news report from Pakistani news channel Dunya News to claim that in an attack by China, India lost 158 soldiers. The video carries the first two photos shared in the claim above.
The video was uploaded to YouTube during the Doklam standoff between India and China. We looked up many credible news sources and found no such report of 158 Indian soldiers being killed by China during that period.
We also found a
report from Chinese Herald, New Zealand which termed this report by Dunya News ‘false news’.
Although it is clear that the first two images are at least three years old, we can not say with certainty when they were clicked.
Image 3
The third and final photo was traced to a
report published in Asian Lite International on July 19, 2017.
Titled ‘
Pakistan Resorts to Shelling in LoC; Two Soldiers Killed’, the report carries the same image with a caption that reads ‘Soldiers carry the body of a soldier who was killed in Rajouri district’s Tarkundi area in cross border firing at Line of Control (
LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir’. The photo is credited to news agency IANS.
Reportedly, two Indian soldiers were killed as the
Pakistan Army
resorted to heavy shelling and firing along several areas of the LoC.
Moreover, no recent credible news reports were found that claimed that 158 Indian soldiers got injured following an attack by China.
VERDICTTimes Fact Check has found old images are being circulated to falsely claim that China attacked Indian and injured 158 of our soldiers.