Misinformation on Balochistan train hijack: ABP News, Dainik Jagran share 2022 video of train attack

by Ankita Mahalanobish

A viral video of explosions targeting a moving train is being circulated by media outlets and on social media with claims that it shows the recently hijacked passenger train in Pakistan. 

On March 11, separatist militants of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) launched an attack on Jaffar Express, which was carrying approximately 400-500 passengers, in southwestern Pakistan’s Balochistan province. The BLA blew up the tracks and opened fire, killing the driver and taking control of the train. About 100 passengers were taken hostage in a siege that went on for 36 hours.

Soon after the incident, several Indian news outlets shared the viral video of the explosion near the train as footage of the hijacked train. Among them was ABP News. On March 12, the media house shared the video in its news segment while debriefing viewers on how the train hijack took place. At the 00:24-minute mark and the 02:03-minute mark in the video below, you can see the viral clip being broadcast; the channel anchors claim that these are new visuals released by BLA. (Archive)

Note that Alt News has debunked misinformation shared by ABP News in several instances.

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Dainik Jagran also shared the clip and said that the explosions shown in the video match the BLA’s claims of the attack–that the rail tracks were blown up before the train was hijacked. However, the Hindi publication specified here that they have not independently verified the video’s authenticity. (Archive)

Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson from Uttar Pradesh, Prashant Umrao (@ippatel), who is also an advocate, posted the viral clip on X and took potshots at Pakistan. Umrao claimed that it was likely the first instance of a train hijack in the world and that it indicates the state of affairs in the neighbouring country. (Archive)

The post garnered over 260,000 views.

Note that Umrao, in 2023, wrongly claimed that 12 migrants from Bihar were hanged in Tamil Nadu for speaking in Hindi. This stoked communal tensions and resulted in him facing legal action. While hearing his case, the Supreme Court had advised Umrao to be cautious and apologize for sharing misinformation. Using Umrao’s case as an example, the SC emphasized the responsibility that comes with freedom of speech.

The clip was also shared an X user named Shraddha (@immortalsoulin) who, according to their bio, is a sub-editor of pro-Right outlet OpIndia. The post had garnered over 150,000 views at the time of this article being written. (Archive)

X user Raushan Sinha (@Mr.Sinha_) also shared the viral video with a caption that the BLA was fighting “tyranny of the Pakistani government” and called them “freedom fighters”. (Archive)

At the time this report was written, the post racked up over 60,000 views.

Note that Alt News has called out and fact checked baseless claims and misinformation by this X user several times.

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Similar claims were also shared by other X accounts, such as @MeghUpdates, @KreatelyMedia, @ocjain4 and @ImtiazMadmood among others:

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Fact Check

We first noticed that none of the international publications used the viral clip or screenshots from it in their reportage.

We then broke down the clip into key frames and did reverse image searches. This led us to a 2022 X post by a CNN stringer named Saleem Mehsud (@SaleemMehsud).

Going by Mehsud’s X bio, his reportage is focused on the Pak-Afghan border region, militancy and extremism. The video in his post, which had frames from the viral video, is from April 2022. The caption says that BLA’s Hakkal Media had released a 10-minute video of terror attacks in Balochistan including an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attack on train, which took place on January 18, 2022. The post also specified the area where this happened 

Taking cue from this, we tried a focused keyword search from around that time and landed on a January 2022 news article from Pakistan media outlet, The Nation. The report said that on January 18, an IED went off on a railway track in the Mashfak area of Sibi when Rawalpindi-bound Jaffar Express was moving towards its destination, resulting in at least two persons being injured.

We investigated further and found the longer version of the video shared by the CNN stringer on BLA’s official media cell, Hakkal. Uploaded on April 14, 2022, the video features footage of attacks carried out by the BLA in 2022. At the 5:48-minute mark, the viral excerpt appears. The video also shows the location, date and time of the attack—Mashkaf, Sibi; January 18, 2022; 2:30 PM—alongside the BLA logo. This confirms that the viral video is part of longer footage of attacks uploaded by the BLA itself in 2022. Here’s a screenshot:

To sum up, the viral clip is actually of a train attacked by BLA in January 2022 and not of the Jaffar Express hijack in March 2025. ABP News and Dainik Jagran used the misleading viral video without verifying. 

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