The Navbharat Times official twitter has been caught retweeting a video that inaccurately claims to show a recent building collapse in a Mumbai suburb.
As the team at SM Hoax Slayer has uncovered, the video, which was originally tweeted by the paper’s resident editor, wasn’t from Mumbai at all. Rather, it was shot during the 2015 Nepal earthquake, which toppled numerous buildings in Kathmandu and around the country.
The paper’s resident editor Sunder Chand tweeted the video Thursday morning and, soon after, it was retweeted by NBT Mumbai’s official twitter handle. The video began circulating on Whatsapp and other social media.
Soon after, the fraud was exposed online and Chand, realizing his mistake, deleted the tweet and issued a public apology.
“The video of Mumbai building collapse that I tweeted turns out to be some other video. I apologise for uploading wrong info,” he wrote, tagging his paper’s official handle. He told ThePrint that the video had been shared with him by a reporter.
But the paper has not yet retweeted the message, nor has it issued its own apology for the gaffe.
The Mumbai building collapse, that the video claimed to depict, occurred Tuesday in the suburb of Ghatkopar and left at least 17 dead. The building’s foundation was reportedly weakened during renovation organized by local Shiv Sena leader Sunil Shitap, who owns multiple flats on its ground floor.
Local police arrested Shitap the next day for culpable homicide and endangering the lives of others.
Earlier this week, ThePrint announced its partnership with SM Hoax Slayer. This report was done in partnership with SM Hoaxslayer