A 2015 video of two people being airlifted to safety by helicopter after severe flooding hit Japan has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times amid reports that falsely claimed it was recently filmed in Bangladesh. While Bangladesh authorities said monsoon rains in August 2024 inundated parts of the South Asian country, killing dozens of people, the footage was falsely recirculated amid reports praising the Bangladeshi military’s rescue efforts.
The video has been viewed more than 450,000 times after it was shared on Facebook on August 22, 2024. The caption in Bengali reads: “Bangladesh Army is our pride.”
In August, flash floods caused widespread damage in Bangladesh, killing at least 40 people (archived links here and here).
The South Asian country of 170 million people and hundreds of rivers has been plagued by flooding in recent decades.
Monsoon rains cause widespread devastation every year, but climate change is causing changing weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
The floods added to the problems in a country still grappling with weeks of political unrest that culminated in the toppling of autocratic leader Sheikh Hasina, who fled to India by helicopter.
She was replaced by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who leads an interim government facing the enormous task of implementing democratic reforms ahead of expected new elections.
The video has also been shared with a similar false claim on Facebook here and here.
Video about floods in Japan
A reverse Google search for the video’s keyframes, followed by keyword searches, yielded the footage, which was published on YouTube by the British newspaper International Business Times on September 10, 2015 (archived link).
“Japan Floods: Couple and their dogs rescued from roof after Joso City flooded,” the video caption reads.
AFP reported at the time that parts of the city of Joso, north of the Japanese capital Tokyo, were washed away when a levee on the Kinugawa River gave way after heavy rainfall (archived link).
Below is a screenshot of the comparison between the falsely shared video on Facebook (left) and the footage from the International Business Times UK (right):
Similar excerpts have been published in reports on the floods in Japan by the US’s NBC News and the Turkish TRT World (archived links here and here).
AFP also circulated an accompanying photo of the rescue operation, attributed to The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.
Below is a screenshot of the photo in the AFP archives:
