False: This video shows fire in Daegu, not near Halloween crowd crush at Itaewon in Seoul
By Zack Chiang 江風白, Kang Can 康灿 and Yuhan Jin 金宇涵
On Oct. 30, a tweet claimed a fire broke out in Seoul, South Korea, near the disaster event during the Halloween celebration, with a video showing heavy black smoke and people filming the fire with their phones.
The video clip has more than 463,000 views and over 2,000 likes as of this writing. The user identifies himself as a journalist in India and has over 3,500 followers.
The video has also been shared by news organizations in Pakistan, Thailand, and Poland, and was included in their reports about the Itaewon crowd surge that killed at least 156 people.
Some news articles even suggested that the crowd started to panic as they tried to flee the fire.
However, the claim is false.
The fire in the video broke out near Dongseong road in Daegu, roughly 240 kilometers away from Seoul.
Although this fire and the Itaewon disaster happened on the same night on Oct. 29, they are two separate incidents.
To investigate the video clip in question, Annie Lab searched the word “국대닭곱새” written on one of the signboards and found four restaurants in South Korea using that name. Two are located in Daegu, and the other two are in Seoul.
We then searched the words “대구” (Daegu), “서울” (Seoul) and “화재” (fire accident), which led to a YouTube video from the Maeil Shinmun, a local news outlet. It was a news report about a fire in Daegu.
This news video shows the same buildings and shops that are seen in the Twitter video, as well as the restaurant signboard we identified.
According to Maeil Shinmun, a fire occurred at 10:34 p.m. on Oct. 29 on the ground floor of a commercial building on Dongseong Road in Jung District.
Five people suffered from smoke inhalation, but no casualty has been reported.
A street view photo taken in September this year for Naver Map, a popular digital map service in South Korea, shows the same stores and buildings there, too.
Meanwhile, no fire was reported during the Itaewon crowd crush in Seoul, which is still under investigation, according to local media.
Disclaimer: Although faculty members at the Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong have done everything possible to verify the accuracy of the story, we cannot guarantee there are no mistakes. If you notice an error or have any questions, please email us.
Originally published at https://annielab.org on November 19, 2022.
