By Archis Chowdhury
A video showing a CCTV footage of a suicide bomber denotating an explosive in the streets is being shared online with the claim that it shows the recent explosion in Istanbul, Taksim Square which killed six people and left over 80 injured.
BOOM found this claim to be false; the footage is six years old and shows another suicide bombing that happened in Istanbul on March 19, 2016.
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A user shared the 11-second CCTV footage of a man walking in the street with people walking by him. At the 3 second mark a bright explosion is seen following which a few people are seen lying injured on the ground, while others scamper nearby in panic.
The captions read, "Security cam footage of the suicide bombing in #istanbul #turkey."
A longer, 25-second version of the same footage was uploaded by a Facebook user, who wrote, "Istanbul blast this evening."
Fact-Check
Towards the end of the footage, BOOM noticed a date and time stamp available which read, "19/03/2016 10:57:55." This suggested that the video is old, and likely from March 19, 2016, and happened at around 10:57 am.
Taking cue from this we did a Google search with keywords "istanbul blast 2016", and came across reports of another blast which had happened in the same Taksim Square area in the city where the recent blast took place.
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According to an article by the BBC, the attack happened at Istanbul's Istiklal Street, a famous pedestrian street and shopping hub, which runs from Tünel Square to Taksm Square, on March 19, 2016 at around 11 am - which matched the date and time stamp provided in the viral video.
We also found another article byThe Jerusalem Post, which provided the same details along with a video that matched the one going viral as recent.
Montenegrin news website VIjesti also curated a number of social media posts that carried the exact same footage.
It is therefore an older video of a similar incident of suicide bombing from six years ago, that happened not far from Taksim Square, the area of Sunday's blast, that is being falsely shared as recent.
