Fact Check: Old Video Of Bridge Collapse In Indonesia Shared As Floods Visuals From Assam

New Delhi (Vishvas News): A video is being shared on social media with the claim that due to the floods in Assam, an iron bridge broke and washed away into the river. It can be seen in the video that due to the strong current of the river, a bridge made of iron, breaks in a few seconds. The viral claim turned out to be false in the investigation done by Vishvas News. Viral video has nothing to do with India. The video is from an incident that happened in Indonesia over a year ago. Which is now being shared with the misleading claim.

Claim:

Facebook user Durga Prasad Mahapatra posted the video and wrote, “The bridge Collapsed due to the strong flow of the river..The situation is serious due to floods in Assam.”

The archive version of this post can be seen here.

Investigation:

Vishvas News used the InVid tool to find out the truth of the viral video. With the help of this tool, we extracted several screengrabs of video and searched them through Google reverse image. We found a report related to the claim on the Indonesia’s news website Tribune News Wiki.

This report was published on 5 April 2021. According to the information given in the report, “The old Kambaniru Bridge on the Kambaniru River was Collapsed due to the floods in the eastern Sumba Regency of Indonesia.

Taking the investigation further, we searched on Google using some keywords. We found several Indonesian news bulletins and articles carrying the visuals of the video.

Indonesian news channel Serambi uploaded the video on 5 April 2021. According to the report, the Ahmad Yani bridge, locally known as the old Kambaniru Bridge, had collapsed due to flash floods.

For more information, we contacted Assam-based journalist Pallavi Saikia. She told us that the viral claim is false. This video is also quite viral in Assam, people are claiming that this is Thaijuwari Bridge. But there is no such bridge in Dima Hasao or Haflong and no such bridge is broken. This video is not from Assam. If such a big incident had happened here, we would have information about it. This post is fake.

Vishvas News, in the last step of the investigation, conducted a background check on the profile that shared the viral post. We found that 897 people follow the user. Durga Prasad Mahapatra hails from Odisha.