Lighthouse Journalism discovered a widely shared video on X, accompanied by claims that a large, weapon-laden ship from a European country en route to Israel—intended for use against Gaza—was destroyed in the Red Sea by Yemen. However, our investigation revealed that this claim is misleading; the video actually originates from Sri Lanka and dates back to 2021.
Claim:
X user @MR_COOL77777 shared the video with a misleading claim on his X handle.
Other users too are sharing the same video with similar claims.
Investigation:
We started the investigation by obtaining keyframes from the video. We then ran a reverse image search on the same.
This led us to several news reports.
A report on ETV Bharat stated: Sri Lanka’s apex environment body on Thursday said a Singapore-flagged cargo vessel, which caught fire near the Colombo beach last week, is in the process of sinking, and that preparation is underway to tackle the resulting oil spill.
The Indian Coast Guard too sent ships to deal with the oil spill. The vessel was holding about 325 metric tonnes of fuel in its tanks.
We also found a video report about the same.
Conclusion: 2021 video of fire of a Singapore-flagged cargo vessel near Colombo beach in Sri Lanka is being shared with misleading claims of it being recent from Israel Gaza conflict. Viral claim is misleading.
