During the night of this Monday, June 10, and early Tuesday, the 11th, the video of the explosion of an antipersonnel mine went viral on the networks. According to users, the event would have occurred in El Terrero, located in the municipality of Aguililla, in Michoacán.
It is a 28-second video in which three people are seen near a military vehicle. Two of them approach the mine, one of them tries to take it, causing an explosion. The third man, who had remained near the vehicle, flees the scene.
According to the users, the men, who were “members of an organized crime gang,” activated the mine that they “intended to place.” On Facebook, a user noted that “the exact information about the day and precise place is unknown.”
However, the viral video was not recorded in Mexico nor are there reports that a similar event occurred in that location.
This video does not show the explosion of an antipersonnel mine in Mexico
We performed a reverse search using one of the images present in the Facebook post, which returned a series of results from April 2024.
On social networks, several profiles published the sequence starting on April 25, pointing out that the recording was made in Ukraine. The men in the video would be Russian soldiers and they would not have tried to pick up an anti-personnel mine, but rather an anti-tank mine. The model attributed to it is a French HPD-2, whose presence in Ukraine had already been alerted in November 2022.
CNN Prima, Czech media, indicated that reports from Ukrainian accounts on Telegram indicate that the clip was recorded in the Donetsk region, in Ukraine. This coincides with the information of the user “lost_inwarua” in X, who geolocated the clip to a point “near the Krashnohorivka settlement”, Marinka district, in Donetsk.
Additionally, the reverse search led us to a video posted on May 2 on the Facebook account of the 21st Independent Special Purpose Battalion OPBr of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The clip was published under the title “it was us” and in the description they indicate that the mine was placed by “the engineers of the 21st special battalion and the engineers of the 59th brigade. In the 2-minute video, they explain the details of this fact:
On the other hand, no recent press reports were found reporting the explosion of an anti-personnel mine in any of the places mentioned in the viral publications. The latest report on the matter, collected by media such as Political Animal, Vanguard MX and SwissInfo.ch, It dates back to March 6 of this year. On that occasion, three men lost their lives after the explosion of a homemade land mine in Tumbiscatío, Michoacán.
Therefore, we classify as false that the clip shows the explosion of an antipersonnel mine in Michoacán, Mexico. In reality, the video was recorded in April of this year and in Ukraine; Furthermore, there are no recent records that the incident reported online has actually occurred.
[Este artículo es parte de la alianza periodística de verificación entre Mala Espina, de Chile, y Voz de América. Para saber más sobre la metodología utilizada en los chequeos, puedes ingresar a este enlace.]
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