At the end of July 2023, a video allegedly captured the escape of illegal migrants from a bus window circulated on the Internet. We checked whether what was happening in the recording was described correctly.

The 12-second video shows a moving bus with people jumping out of the window as it moves. With the caption “Illegal migrants who were decided to be deported from Germany have found a way to stay in it,” the video spread in the Russian-language segment of Telegram - in particular, it was shared by the channels “Uncle Slava"(188,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Militarist"(116,000), "Belarusian security officer"(76,000), "Tough of the day"(74,000). According to the TGStat service, the video was watched by at least 2 million users of the platform. It was also published in "VKontakte", "Odnoklassniki", Instagram and on Rutube.

A reverse search of the video frames shows that there was a previous video with a similar caption spread in the English-language segment of Twitter, while some users called the location of the filming not Germany, but the Republic of South Africa. As our colleagues from Lead Stories, July 19 website Opera News Nigeria published an article in which he identified the video as being filmed in South Africa, and the migrants were called Nigerians.

Even earlier versions of the video are discovered in publications in Arabic. In particular, in a post on the Twitter account of an Iraqi news site ABC on July 3, it said the footage was filmed in Algeria and showed illegal migrants from other North African countries jumping through a broken bus window. The ABC video is two seconds longer and of higher quality, allowing the car's registration number to be seen in the foreground.

License plate matches Algerian registration system: yellow plate with three groups of numbers. The number 16 on the right indicates the province of Algeria, in the middle in a group of three numbers 1 corresponds to a passenger vehicle, and 15 corresponds to the year of its first registration, 2015.

In two publications in Arabic-language media, “Algeria today" And Al Arabiya from July 2, the video is another second longer, and it is clear that the original shooting was vertical. And the earliest “Verified” version of the video found lasts 16 seconds. and was published July 1st. Algeria Today clarifies that the video spread on social networks, and the incident itself occurred on the East-West Highway. Available on Google maps, photographs of this route, combined with details in the video and media publications, allow us to assert that the video was actually filmed in this North African country.

Thus, the original video was filmed in Algeria no later than July 1, 2023 and was initially distributed without distortion, but was then cropped, placed in a false context and disseminated in this form, apparently for the purpose of disinformation.

Cover photo: still frame from the video.