News of the helicopter crash that killed Iran’s president and foreign minister May 19 sparked a flurry of images on social media. But some of the photos gaining attention do not show the actual scene on the ground.
One viral May 20 post on X claimed to show the wreckage of the plane that came down in northwest Iran near the border with Azerbaijan, framing it as “breaking news.” The post includes three photos of a crash and a video of rescuers holding a stretcher.
“Breaking news: Many bodies of those died in Iran President Raisi helicopter crash have been burnt and cannot be identified,” the X post claimed, using all capital letters.
The video in the post is real footage from the May 19 crash released by the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran’s official news agency. But two of the three photos were taken from a separate Iranian crash that happened four years ago.
One image shows the tail of a crashed plane embossed with the Iranian flag and the number 1136. Another photo shows several rescue workers at the crash site; one rescuer wears a white mask and looks into the camera.
The photos are from an April 22, 2020, plane crash in Iran. That plane was traveling from Bisheh Kolah, Mazandaran province, to the capital Tehran, according to the Iranian Red Crescent, a humanitarian relief organization, in an X post.
Iranian news outlet Rokna reported on the crash April 22, 2020. (We converted the article’s Persian calendar date of 1399/02/3 to the Gregorian calendar used in many parts of the world.) The state-owned Mehr News Agency also reported about the crash on the same date and said the aircraft was a “training plane” owned by Iranian police.
Ghoncheh Habibiazad, a BBC journalist who monitors Iranian media, said the state-affiliated Fars News Agency published a third photo in the post that shows uniformed officers surrounding a blue aircraft’s tail.
The photos from 2020 do not accurately show the crash that killed Iran President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian. We rate the out-of-context photos in the X post False.