Five passengers died on board the Titan submersible in June 2023 when it imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreck off the US coast of Newfoundland. In the aftermath, a video has been shared hundreds of thousands of times on social media claiming to show the victims’ final moments before the tragedy. However, the claims are false: the people seen in the clip do not match the crew involved in last month’s fatal accident. AFP Fact Check traced the footage to an investor in the OceanGate company, which founded the Titan, who confirmed that he filmed the clips during an expedition in August 2021.

The video shows clear blue waters outside the bull’s-eye window of a submersible before panning across five crew members, including a woman. The camera then swings back to the ocean, revealing a sizeable rusted vessel.

“Apparently, they did arrive at the titanic #OpenGate”, says the caption below a Facebook reel that has been shared thousands of times since it was published on a South African page on June 25, 2023.

Text superimposed on the clip reads: “Submarine video watch it before they delete it (sic)”.

A logo in the footage showed the clip was originally published on TikTok, where it has garnered more than 2.8 million likes and 130,000 shares since June 24, 2023.

Various versions of the video, showing sequences of multiple lengths, have also shared the claim in other languages, such as here and here in Spanish.

Titan catastrophe

As reported by AFP, the Titan sub, owned by...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiTmh0dHBzOi8vbmV3cy55YWhvby5jb20vdmlk...