Did Al Jazeera publish a video that reported the United Arab Emirates froze the purchase of 80 Rafale F4 fighter jets from France over the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, as posts on X claimed? No, that's not true: Al Jazeera told Lead Stories that's not their report, and that the video is "fake." Likewise, the French embassy in the United Arab Emirates told Lead Stories that the report is "fake news" and "fabricated."
A version of the claim appeared in a video posted on X on August 27, 2024 (archived here). It showed the Al Jazeera logo so as to appear as though the news outlet had created the clip. A caption with the post read:
🇦🇪 🇫🇷 The UAE has frozen a contract to purchase 80 fighter jets from France: Durov's arrest has angered the sheikhs.
- The United Arab Emirates took drastic measures by freezing a contract to purchase 80 French fighter jets following the arrest of Pavel Durov.
- The creator of Telegram, who is personally acquainted with the son of the UAE Prime Minister, found himself at the center of an international scandal that has infuriated the sheikhs to the limit.
- Experts believe that by its actions, France has made a serious mistake, provoking the anger of influential allies. Now, Paris is paying for its rashness, and the future of the deal, as well as the trust of the UAE, hangs by a thread.
This how the post appeared at the time of writing:
Below
(Source: X screenshot taken Thurs Aug 29 16:12:51 2024 UTC)
Lead Stories contacted Al Jazeera, and in an email received on August 29, 2024, the network said:
The content circulating on social media claiming that the UAE has frozen the purchase of 80 fighter jets from France and attributing this news to Al Jazeera is fake and we refute this attribution to the media network.
Similarly, a spokesperson for the French embassy in the United Arab Emirates told Lead Stories in an email received on August 29, 2024, that "this is indeed fake news" and confirmed that the purported Al Jazeera video is "fabricated as well."
Text laid over the video read, in part:
The UAE has frozen the contract actions for the purchase of 80 fighter aircraft from France. This comes after the arrest of businessman Pavel Durov in Paris. It is known that the UAE Prime Minister vetoed the continuation of action on the contract. Experts believe that the contract freeze is directly related to the arrest of UAE citizen Pavel Durov. Pavel Durov had direct contact with the son of Emirati Prime Minister Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum.
The supposed Al Jazeera video began circulating after Pavel Durov, CEO of the messaging app Telegram, was arrested at a Paris airport on August 24, 2024, according to a Google-translated press release (archived here) written in French and published by the Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris (Judicial Court of Paris) on August 26, 2024. Durov was arrested as part of an investigation into cybercrime that opened on July 8, 2024.
Lead Stories found no record of the media outlet publishing such a video or story between Durov's arrest on August 24, 2024, and the date of writing.
To further confirm statements from the French embassy and Al Jazeera, Lead Stories searched the publication's website (archived here). We found no article supporting the publication's reporting of the claim that is the focus of this fact check. Instead, the only relevant result was an announcement of the agreed-upon deal published on December 3, 2021, titled "UAE buys record 80 French Rafale jets in $19bn arms deal" (archived here). It began:
The United Arab Emirates and France have signed a $19bn arms deal that will see the Gulf state acquire 80 Rafale fighter jets and 12 military helicopters.
The largest-ever overseas sale of Rafale jets was sealed on Friday as French President Emmanuel Macron began a two-day trip to the Gulf, during which he will also visit Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Lead Stories also searched through the Al Jazeera social media channels where such a video would presumably be published. We backdated this search to all content posted between the date of Durov's arrest, August 24, 2024, and the publication of this fact check. Nowhere on the Al Jazeera website was there an article supporting the claims made in the video on X.
No such video was published on the news outlet's English-version social media accounts listed on the website, including Facebook (archived here), X (archived here), YouTube (archived here) and Instagram.
Reverse image searches of a screenshot of the opening slide using Google Lens (archived here), Yandex (archived here) and TinEye (archived here) did not return any results relative to Al Jazeera reporting. The footage was a stock video hosted by Shutterstock (archived here) of the "Flag of the United Arab Emirates waving in the air over Sharjah's Flag Island."
