A video of school children being rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building is making rounds on social media, suggesting that the incident occurred in Ghana.
In the less than a minute-long video, people are heard screaming while others are seen busily rummaging through the rubbles for victims suspected to be trapped under.
Eventually, a child is pulled out alive but distraught and wailing in pain.
The video has been shared by at least 4 social media users on Facebook and X, claiming the incident happened in Ghana.
A local wooden school structure collapse on kids in the North East Region. But @MBawumia is unconcern. pic.twitter.com/HItx12hbDF
— CONQUER GH???????????? (@azusisme) March 20, 2024
One of the X handles claiming that the accident happened in Ghana captioned it as “A local wooden school structure collapse on kids in the North East Region. But @MBawumia is not concern.”
Fact-Check Ghana verified the video and presents the findings as follows.
Claim: “A local wooden school structure collapse on kids in the North East Region. But @MBawumia is not concerned”.
Verdict: False.
To authenticate and verify the origin of the video, we subjected keyframes of the video to verification using Google reverse image search.
The search found that the video was first posted on January 14, 2024, by some social media handles. Subsequently, the same video was shared on a Facebook page named Ziana TV on January 16, 2024, with a French caption.
The caption is translated to mean “Democratic Republic of Congo The Drama. Collapse of the walls of a classroom at Mutshilua primary school in the middle of class, the events took place on Saturday, January 13, 2024, around 11 a.m. in the city of Tshumbe in the province of Sankuru; Results: 16 children injured. Sensitive souls refrain”.
A further search by Fact-Check Ghana also revealed that the same video has been shared by many on social media in Uganda and Nigeria claiming to have happened in a town called Tororo in Uganda and Toro Local Government Area in Bauchi State, Nigeria respectively.
We also found that a Fact-Checking website, PesaCheck had verified the video and confirmed that the incident happened in DR Congo. The site identified the language spoken in the video as Kikongo, a language spoken in DR Congo.
A search of the phrase “à l’école primaire MUTSHILUA” which translates as “a classroom at Mutshilua primary school” led to a Congolese news website which reported that the incident indeed happened in DR Congo on January 13, 2024.
The news report stated that the Superintendent of the Tshumbe district, François Lububu confirmed that 16 students were seriously injured in the process.
Based on the above, the video of students trapped in rubble shared on social media did not occur in the North East Region of Ghana but rather in Tshumbe district in DR Congo.
