A video showing aircraft releasing flares has gone viral on social media, with Twitterati claiming it was footage from Tuesday's Balakot airstrike by the Indian Air Force that wiped out '300 terrorists'.
Sadly it was a case of exuberance going wrong. The widely shared video is in fact a three-year-old video of the Pakistan Air Force's aircraft flying over Islamabad. The actual video dated 23 September 2016 was posted by a user on YouTube with the title 'Pakistan Airforce Islamabad night flying.'
Watch the original video here:
Soon after news broke out about the airstrike, Twitterati started sharing the fake video. Here are some of the tweets by netizens:
Even a few TV channels aired the fake video.
In the pre-dawn strike, 12 Mirage 2000 fighter jets of IAF destroyed the camp. The strike came 12 days after the deadly terror attack in Pulwama. Sources have confirmed that the strike took place not in PoK but in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province 80 km from the LoC.
The attack was termed a "non-military pre-emptive strike" by Indian foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale who hoped that Pakistan will now live up to its promise of fighting terror and destroy the remaining infrastructure of the terror groups.