Lighthouse Journalism found a few pictures being widely circulated on social media platforms. The pictures were claimed to be of members of the US Department of Energy near Pakistan’s Kirana Hills, suggesting a nuclear leak.
During the investigation, we found that the images were old and unrelated to the recent India-Pakistan conflict.
Claim:
X user @Meghnad_Lanka shared the visuals of a few men inspecting a site.
Other users are also sharing the same images with similar claims.
Investigation:
We ran a Google reverse image search on the images shared by social media users.
Picture 1:
We found the first image in a blog uploaded in 2012.
This was a blog by Carl Willis Joint about his visit to the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site.
Picture 2:
We found that this picture was uploaded by budapsttimes.hu.
The caption said: An adit, or tunnel, at the now-closed Semipalatinsk nuclear test site.
The article, uploaded in 2021, had several images. The introduction said that over 30 years ago, the Kazakhstan people made a fundamental choice in favour of a world free from nuclear weapons. On 29 August 1991, by his decree, the First President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Elbasy NA Nazarbayev, closed the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site.
Picture 3:
This picture was used by abc.net.au in their article.
The caption of the image said: An underground bunker used to monitor Soviet era nuclear tests. (ABC News: K Johnson)
Semipalatinsk Test Site or simply ‘The Polygon’ is an 18,000-square-kilometre area on the Kazakh Steppe where the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests before the site was officially closed for testing in 1991.
Today, the Polygon is home to research on the effects of the tests on the surrounding ecology. And it is also open for tours.
Conclusion: Old pictures from the Semipalatinsk test site, a nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, are now being shared as recent from Kirana Hills, Pakistan. The pictures are not related to the recent India-Pakistan conflict. The viral claim is false.
