The message contains a 10 second video with the logo of News18an Indian subsidiary of the international news channel CNN.
“The landslide that took place in Gofa. The death toll has risen to 300,” reads the Amharic text added to the video.
The footage shows a massive landslide breaking down a mountainside. A woman’s voice says in Amharic: “Please help the affected people, for the sake of God.”
Ethiopian tragedy
The deadliest landslide on record in Ethiopia devastated the mountain village of Kencho Shacha Gozdi in Gofa district, located in the southern part of the country on July 21, 2024 (archived here).
According to the UN, at least 257 people have died from the heavy rainfall, and the death toll could even double.
On July 27, 2024, the Ethiopian parliament convened announced three days of mourning as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed visited the devastated community (archived here).
However, the images associated with the landslide in Ethiopia are not related to each other.
Indian disaster
AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to carry out reverse image search on key frames from the video.
The search results showed that the film material shows a massive landslide that hit the Siju region of South Garo Hills in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya in 2022 (archived here).
The clip used in the fake post starts 23 seconds into the original footage, which was published by News18 on its official YouTube channel on June 28, 2022, a day after the landslide.
The News18 logo appears in the top right corner.
The search results also contain a link to a news broadcast released by North East TV, another Indian news channel whose report on the landslide included similar footage (archived here).
“These are images from Siju, southern Garo Hills of Meghalaya, where a major landslide is seen,” the anchor says.
An Indian news website also reported on the landslide and shared a matching photo (archived here).
On the same website there is also a video on Facebook (archived here).
The natural sound of the landslide in the original footage of the event was altered in the clip that was wrongly linked to Ethiopia. It was replaced with a female voice calling for support in Amharic.
