Hyderabad: Fake news had a field day after the Pakistan Air Force tried to retaliate against the Indian attack across the Line of Control.
Pakistan media aired fake footage of IAF aircraft being shot down in the aftermath of the attack by the IAF on militant training camps across the LoC early Tuesday morning. Several Pakistani TV channels ran old footage of a MiG and a Hawk aircraft going down, claiming this happened in the recent aerial engagement.
But the IAF Hawk had gone down near Subarnarekha River on the Odisha-Jharkhand border in March 2018, while the MiG-27 fighter aircraft had crashed in a residential area in Jodhpur in Rajasthan in 2016.
Another channel aired a video clip of an IAF pilot who survived the twin crash of the Suryakiran aerobatics display team in Bengaluru on February 19 this year.
The Pakistani newspaper The Dawn, on Wednesday morning, carried a report with the headline 'PAF shoots down two Indian aircraft inside Pakistani airspace, one pilot arrested'. The accompanying photograph showed an aircraft in flames. Some fact-checking showed that the image was of an IAF fighter trainer aircraft that crashed in Odisha in 2015. The newspaper's website then pulled down the image.
Another Pakistani newspaper, Express Tribune, ran a story headlined 'PAF strikes Indian targets across LoC, two IAF jets shot down'. But Major General Asif Ghafoor of Pakistan was quick to deny it.
All through Wednesday, numerous pictures were making the rounds on social media, some of them posted by Pakistani journalists and citizens (identified through their Twitter handle).
Similarly, the Indian government also lied about all pilots being accounted for and only admitted a pilot was missing in action during the afternoon briefing by the ministry of external affairs spokesperson.
