By: Ishita Goel
October 6 2023
Old video from 2020 shared as recent Thailand mall shooting
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A X post claiming that the attached video shows a mall shooting in Thailand in 2023 (Source: Wikimedia Commons/X/Screenshot/Modified by Logically Facts)
Fact-Check
The Verdict False
A video from a 2020 mall shooting in Thailand is being peddled as a recent video from the October 2023 shooting in Bangkok’s Siam Paragon.
Claim ID 8aa5ba04
On October 4, 2023, two people were killed and five people injured after a 14-year-old boy opened fire at the Siam Paragon shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand. The teenager was arrested and has been charged on six counts, including premeditated murder, a report by CNN said, quoting police.
What is the claim?
Following this, social media saw a spike in posts relating to the incident. Multiple visuals of the incident were shared, along with some unrelated footage.
One such video showing armed people lying on the floor was shared as originating from the shooting. Several X users shared the video and captioned it claiming that it showed the 14-year-old opening fire inside the Siam Paragon mall. The archives of these links can be accessed here and here.
Screenshot of viral posts making the false claim. (Source: X/Screenshot/Modified by Logically Facts)
What are the facts?
Through a reverse image search, we were able to trace the video back to 2020. Thai news website Sanook published a shorter but higher-quality version of the viral video on February 8, 2020. The video in the Sanook report matches the footage seen in the viral video from the timestamp 0:29 onwards. In its report, in Thai, which we translated to English, said that "an assailant (had) opened fire in the heart of Nakhon Ratchasima city and fled into the Terminal 21 Korat mall."
Similarly, Facebook page called เรื่องเด่นออนไลน์ (top stories online) posted the same video as Sanook on its Facebook page on February 9 and wrote in Thai that the video shows a "clip of the incident where officers exchanged fire with those who were shooting at people, inside the Terminal 21 Korat mall.”
The video on a Thai news website and social media account of a media organization (Source: Sanook(L)/Facebook(R)/Screenshot/Modified by Logically Facts)
We were able to compare the signs on the escalator, the wheelchairs, and the men lying on the floor in both videos, proving that the viral video is from this 2020 incident.
Comparison of the viral video(L) and the video posted by Top stories online(R) (Source: X/Facebook/Screenshot/Modified by Logically Facts)
The Associated Press reported in February 2020 that a soldier angry about a land dispute went on a shooting spree for 16 hours in northeastern Thailand before holing up inside the Terminal 21 Korat mall in Nakhon Ratchasima city, where he was eventually shot dead by police. The incident left 29 dead and dozens injured.
The verdict
The video is indeed from a mall shooting in Bangkok, but from 2020. It is unrelated to the 2023 shooting incident in the Siam Paragon mall. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.