Lighthouse Journalism came across a post being widely shared on X, the post claimed that Chinese MSS and Indian Army eliminated a dreaded terrorist and were seen celebrating. During the investigation we found that the video of the celebration was old and not recent.
Claim:
X user Shuvankar Biswas shared the video on his profile.
Other users too are sharing the video with different claims.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by running a reverse image search on keyframes obtained from the video.
This led us to a tweet by Vishnu Som on December 12, 2018.
We also found the video on the X handle of ADG PI – INDIAN ARMY.
We also found several news reports about the dance.
The reports mentioned: Indian and Chinese troops gathered for the 7th Sino-India joint exercise, Hand-in-Hand 2018, a Chengdu in China recently. All went according to routine, till they decided to do something unusual, and danced the bhangra together on the sidelines.
However, top Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Usman Bhai was killed in an encounter started in Khanyar area of Central Kashmir’s Srinagar district, as claimed in the post. We found a few news reports about the same too.
Conclusion: 2018 video of Indian and Chinese troops dancing the bhangra steps on the sidelines of annual military drill is being shared with claims of it being recent. Viral claims are misleading.
