Gralhix OSINT Exercise #006
A record of my attempt at solving OSINT Exercise #006 by Sofia Santos, as part of my self-study efforts.
The original exercise can be found here:
https://gralhix.com/list-of-osint-exercises/osint-exercise-006/
Brief
On January 19, 2023, a journalist with almost 140k followers on Twitter shared an image of a destroyed vehicle amidst a large cloud of smoke and fire. The tweet said: “BREAKING: TTP carried out a suicide attack on a police post in Khyber city of Pakistan that killed three Pakistani police officers.“
The photo is not of the event described by the journalist.
a) Verify the statement above
Method
Image search
My first thought is to try and find a different event which matches the given photo. An initial Google Lens search doesn’t bring up any matches with the above image, other than posted solutions for this OSINT challenges (which were avoided).
Attack information
Instead of trying to match the above image with a different bombing, I could try and come at it from the angle of finding a verified photo of the actual suicide attack from the tweet and comparing.
I can see that the attack was carried out on the 19th of January 2023, and was in Khyber City.
Searching through the news outlet articles doesn’t provide me with any more verified information, however I eventually come across a record of terrorist attacks on the website South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP). It gives a little more detail, stating that the attack took place at:
the Takhta Beg Police checkpost in Jamrud tehsil (revenue unit) of Khyber District in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP)
Searching for this location leads me to the Takhta Baig Check Post, but there is no Street View of the location, and while I can find multiple articles reporting the attack, none shows external photographs.
Back to image search
After hitting a bit of a dead end, I decided to try other image searching engines and had a few hits with Yandex.
The image (or part of it) was used in this article, posted in January 2020 — two years before the attack on the Takhta Baig check post.
This alone backs up the statement from the brief, but I wanted to try and find the exact event the image came from.
I find the image used on a Military Wiki, purportedly showing a car bombing in Iraq, but with no citations or related evidence.
Switching over to Tineye gives me a better result, with an Alamy page selling licenses to the image. It has the following citation:
060827-N-6477M-395 Waziriya, Iraq (Aug. 27, 2006) — A Vehicle Born Improvised Explosive Devise (VBIED) after exploding on a street outside of the Al Sabah newspaper office in the Waziryia district of Baghdad, Iraq. The VBIED destroyed more than 20 cars, killing two people and wounding as many as 30. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Eli J. Medellin (RELEASED)
The original photo was taken over 16 years before the attack on the Takhta Baig Check Post in Baghdad.
Lessons Learned
The lesson learned here is to check multiple image search engines, rather than relying on a single one.
