After an Azerbaijan Airlines plane crashed in Kazakhstan in December, killing 38 people, a video surfaced on social media in several languages along with a claim that it showed the moments leading up to the tragedy. The clip, which was first circulated in news reports from September 2024 about the technical malfunction of an Air Algerie flight, was also falsely linked to the deadliest plane crash in South Korea on December 29. killed 179 people. The plane seen in the video was able to return safely to Algiers International Airport.
“The last sounds heard on board flight J2-8243. Terrible news before the new year due to the accident of Azerbaijan Airlines in Kazakhstan,” read a Thai-language post on December 28, 2024 on TikTokwhere it collected 1.5 million views.
The video shows passengers chanting an Islamic prayer in a plane with their oxygen masks on. A flight attendant in blue is seen walking down the aisle.
It then cuts to footage of a plane wreck, a memorial and people defecating in an airport.
Screenshot of the fake TikTok post, taken January 2, 2025
The post emerged after the Azerbaijan Airlines Embraer 190 plane on land on Christmas Day in Kazakhstan, killing 38 of the 67 people on board (archive link).
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has asked Moscow to admit that it shot down the plane by mistake as it attempted to make a scheduled landing at Grozny airport in Russia.
Russia has not confirmed that one of its anti-aircraft missiles hit the plane, although President Vladimir Putin told Aliyev in a phone call that the systems were active at the time and that sorry that the incident happened in Russian airspace.
The same claim linking the video to the Azerbaijan Airlines crash also appeared in other Facebook posts from Thailand, Bangladesh and the Philippines.
He came in too Simple Chinese social media posts that falsely claimed to show the last moments on board a Jeju water a Thai airliner that crashed in South Korea, killing all but two of the 181 people on board (archive link).
The exact cause of the Boeing 737-800 crash is not yet known, but investigators have pointed to bird strike, faulty landing gear and runway obstruction as possible issues.
In fact, the film circulated months before the two fatal plane crashes, along with reports of a technical malfunction that forced an Air Algerie flight to return to Algiers in September 2024.
Fly Air Algerie
A reverse image search on Google found the video to Facebook mail by Info Trafic Algerie, Algerian traffic information siteon September 23, 2024 (archive links here and here).
The post, written in Arabic, said the video showed Air Algerie flight AH 3018, which had a technical problem on its way to the Turkish city of Istanbul.
“The captain of the flight decided to return to Houari Boumediene International Airport an hour after departure as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety and security of the passengers and crew,” read part of the Arabic post.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the fake posts (left) and the video shared by Info Trafic Algerie (right):
A screenshot comparison of the video in the fake posts (left) and the video shared by Info Trafic Algerie (right)
A screenshot of the video was also published alongside a report on the plane's return to Algiers by a local daily Al Shorouk news on September 24, 2024 (archive link).
Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera also published a similar video on its official YouTube channel on September 25, 2024, with chants of “Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)” heard from 36-second mark (archive link).
The description of the video said it shows moments of panic experienced by passengers in an Algerian plane that experienced a technical malfunction, forcing it to make an emergency landing.
The rest of the footage included in the circulating video is real – the clip of the Azerbaijan Airlines crash was published by several news outlets, including a British newspaper. the Telegraph (archive link).
It also included a video of a a memorial for the victims of the crash, as well as footage of a moment of silence for the victims at Baku Airport – where the plane took off – released by AFP here (archive links here and here).
