Old fire videos falsely tied to Moscow strikes

Old fire videos falsely tied to Moscow strikes

Two unrelated fire videos, one from a 2020 UAE market blaze and one from a March 2026 Egyptian restaurant fire, spread on social media this week as supposed footage of Ukraine's 20-21 September drone strikes on Moscow¹.

Why it matters: Both clips racked up shares within hours of the real strikes, showing how quickly recycled footage fills the information gap before verified imagery of an attack emerges¹.

Driving the news:

• Posts on Facebook and X, including Hindi-language captions, presented the clips as new damage from the 20-21 September Moscow strikes¹.
• AFP traced the first clip to a 5 August 2020 market fire in Ajman, UAE, matching keyframes to a 2020 Facebook post and Gulf News coverage of that blaze, and confirmed the location against Google Street View imagery¹.
• The second clip matched a 20 March 2026 post by Egyptian outlet Khabar showing a restaurant fire in Kafr Tahermes, Egypt, five months before the Moscow strikes it was later attached to¹. Independent fact-checker Newschecker.in separately traced the clip and found it actually shows a commercial fire in the Talbiya area of Faisal, Giza, Egypt, noting the same footage was previously misused in July 2026 to claim it showed an Iranian strike on Israel².

The big picture: AFP's verification relied on standard open-source techniques (reverse-image search, keyframe matching against earlier posts, and Street View corroboration) rather than any specialised access, the same toolkit OSINT investigators use to check breaking-conflict footage before it's confirmed¹.