Fact Check: Video showing a kid entangled in threads of a kite is not from Ahmedabad but Taiwan
The festival of Uttarayan, Sankranti or Pongal was celebrated in several states of India. Makar Sankranti is the festival of kites and it also marks the end of cold days and beginning of the spring.
The festival of Uttarayan, Sankranti or Pongal was celebrated in several states of India. Makar Sankranti is the festival of kites and it also marks the end of cold days and beginning of the spring. People believe that while flying kites, exposure to the sun rays gives abundant Vitamin D. Gujarat hosts the International Kite festival every year, about 150 delegates from 44 countries arrive here to take part in the event.
Meanwhile, a video of a little kid entangled in the strings of a kite and being lifted away along with it is being shared virally on social media with a claim that it occurred in Ahmedabad.
The claim in Telugu goes as
“అహ్మదాబాద్లో మూడేళ్ల బాలిక గా
The claim is virally shared in English also.
The video was also shared on WhatsApp virally.
Fact check:
The claim is false. This incident occurred in Taiwan in 2020.
When we searched the extracted key frames from the video using Google reverse image search, we found that the video was shared by several social media accounts in the past 2 years.
A facebook page named Techno marketing shared this video in September 2020, but there is no mention of the place where the incident took place.
The video was shared on reddit too, with the caption “Child lifted meters into the air by a giant kite at Taiwan festival”
Taking the cue from the title, when we searched with the keywords “Child lifted by kite at Taiwan festival”, we found several news reports from August 2020.
Videos of the incident were shared by several YouTube news channels.
Here is the video published by SCMP clips on August 31, 2020.
The description on the video published by Guardian news states that the footage shows a girl, 3, in Taiwan being lifted high into the air after becoming entangled in the strings of a kite. The unidentified girl was taking part in a kite festival on Sunday in the seaside town of Nanliao when she was hoisted several metres into the air by the giant, long-tailed orange kite. News reports said the girl was frightened but suffered no physical injuries in the incident.
According to the news reports, a three-year-old girl in Taiwan has been caught up in the strings of a kite and lifted high into the air in front of the horrified onlookers. The girl survived the incident without any injuries.
The International Kite Festival was being held in the city of Hsinchu, south of the capital Taipei. The video of the accident, which was circulated widely on social media, showed several people preparing the large
long-tailed pale orange kite for flight next to a crowd of viewers. Then, the organizers let the kite go – and it flies up, along with a toddler dangling from its tail. It’s not clear how close she was to the kite on the ground, or how she got caught in it.
The video shot at the scene showed her twisting several times above a crowd of adults who struggled to pull the kite back to earth.
The video ends with the tail of the kite relatively slowly dropping to the ground as those people nearby rush to help the girl.
News reports said the girl was frightened but suffered no physical injuries in the incident.
Hence, the viral video shows an incident from Taiwan that occurred in 2020 and is not from Ahmedabad, Gujarat and is NOT recent.