Misinformation about major road accidents often circulates online, with social media users regularly sharing unrelated images. In a recent case, photos of a fatal bus crash in India were repeatedly shared in Facebook posts about an imagined tragedy in neighboring Bangladesh. AFP found reports circulating of an accident in a Himalayan ravine that killed at least 36 people and injured several others.
“Twenty people, including children, died in a tragic accident when a bus plunged into a gorge near Khagrachari,” read a Bengali caption on a Facebook page. after shared on November 5, 2024.
Khagrachari is a city in the southeastern hilly region of Bangladesh that previously made headlines for road accidents in June and April this year (archived links here and here).
The message – shared more than 700 times –featured four photos of people looking at the wreckage of a damaged bus on a hill.
Part of the caption of the post also read: “The bus had 45 passengers on board. The number of deaths may rise. Many passengers are still trapped in the bus and an operation is underway to rescue them.”
A screenshot of the fake Facebook post
The photos, which AFP discovered were taken from media reports of a bus crash in India, were shared alongside a similar false claim elsewhere on Facebook, here and here.
There are no official reports of such a fatal bus accident in Khagrachari from November 13, 2024.
India accident
A reverse image search found the photos in several media reports, including here and here about an accident on November 4, 2024 in the northwestern Indian state of Uttarakhand (archived links here and here).
Indian news agency ANI published three of the photos here, here and here (archived links here, here and here).
It captioned one of the photos from November 4 with “23 killed as bus falls into gorge in Uttarakhand’s Almora. (Photo/ANI).”
The fourth photo was published in a Press Trust of India (PTI) report on the same accident (archived here).
Below is a screenshot comparison between the image compilation in the fake message (left) and the photos published by ANI and the PTI (right):
Screenshot comparison of the image compilation in the fake post (left) and the photos published by ANI and the PTI (right)
A bus in India fell into a deep gorge in the Almora district of northwestern Uttarakhand state on November 4, killing at least 36 passengers and injuring several others, AFP reported (archived link).
Photos from Uttarakhand’s Department of Information and Public Relations also showed a similar scene below:
Department of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) Uttarakhand
Department of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) Uttarakhand
A journalist from AFP’s New Delhi bureau identified Hindi-language texts on the vehicle’s roof rack – Gangotri and Yamunotri – referring to religious pilgrimage sites in Uttarakhand.
The district authorities published this list of accident victims on November 4, 2024, with the coordinates of the crash in the Marchula area of the Almora district (archived link).
The location in the photos generally corresponds to this roadside in Marchula on Google Street View (archived link).
