A VIDEO OF a dramatic and deadly explosion at a filling station has been shared online with captions that imply it was caused by an electric car. In fact, the footage shows a car with a gas tank explode in Uzbekistan.
The video was shared on multiple social media platforms, including by the accounts of Stew Peters, a podcaster who regularly spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories, including claims that Covid-19 vaccines are actually snake venom that turn people into satanic reptiles, or that elites are drinking the blood of children.
“I’ll keep my internal combustion engine, thanks,” Peters wrote on his verified Twitter account, alongside the video of a car exploding.
This single post had accumulated 2.6 million views at the time of writing.
Another version of the same video shared on the Facebook read: “Buy an electric car they said…” with an emoji of a person peeking through their fingers held up over their eyes.
However, both these captions are misleading; the video does not show an electric car. Instead, it shows an explosion of a car with an internal combustion engine, which resulted in the death of one person in Uzbekistan.
While both the misleading posts featured a cropped video, more complete versions of the security footage show an onscreen date: February 25.
Posts on the social media accounts of the Department of Emergency Situations of Samarkand region of Uzbekistan published that day say there had been a blast involving a gas cylinder at a filling station in the area.
A picture posted alongside the department’s announcement shows a number of architectural features that confirm that it was taken at the same filling station as that in the video. They also posted a photo of the broken gas tank, which can also be seen in the video, flying through the air following the explosion and hitting a person.
Authorities said that one worker had been killed, though no one else was injured.
They said that a gas cylinder of a Nexia 3 – a Chevrolet car brand sold in Uzbekistan, based on their Aveo model – burst as it was being filled with Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), a popular alternative fuel for internal combustion engines that is popular in Uzbekistan.
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