FACT CHECK: Old and Unrelated Image Goes Viral as Car Wreck of Controversial Swedish Artist Lars Vilks…

Controversial Swedish artist Lars Vilks was killed in a car crash on October 4, 2021, after two murder attempts by fanatics following his drawing of the Prophet Mohammed with a dog. Shortly after the death of the provocateur artist at Sweden, some pictures have emerged on Social media platforms claiming it is from the same accident.  

The most viral of them is of what looks like a Yellow coloured burning sports car with the front all mangled. 

Facebook link | Archived link | Archived Link

Fact Crescendo found that the image of the car crash is actually from an accident at Hyderabad, India in 2015 and has no connection with the death of the artist. Let’s get to the details…

Fact Check Methodology

At first we ran a Google search with relevant keywords to check if the news of the death of the artist is genuine. We saw a report published on October 4, 2021 on The Sun UK with the headline “KILLER SMASH Swedish artist killed in mystery car crash after two murder attempts by fanatics following drawings of Prophet Mohammed.”

The news report states that Swedish artist Lars Vilks was killed in a car crash when the police car he was driving in careened onto the wrong side of the road, colliding with a truck. The fatal crash took place at Markaryd, in Kronoberg, Sweden.

We looked around and went through more news reports like the one above but could not find the image of the crash that is going viral on social media. So we decided to run a Google Reverse Image Search. The search showed us results of an accident that had taken place in India in 2015. 

Automobile website Zero2Turbo had published a report on April 13, 2015 headlined “Yellow Porsche 997 Turbo Burnt To Crisp After High Speed Crash In India.” The article states “The car apparently aquaplaned at around 250 km/h which resulted in a brutal impact with the barrier and then caught fire. The driver managed to get out of the car before the flames got too big and escaped with minor injuries.” 

Zero2Turbo Link

We also ran a reverse image search on Yandex and came across another site, Motoroids, which had published multiple images of the accident in an article on April 13, 2015 and located the viral image among the ones in it.

Motoroid Link

Following this, we ran a relevant keyword search and saw a news report on the same accident published in The Hindustan Times on April 13, 2015. The news report has an image of the same car but from another angle and states that a businessman driving at a high speed escaped death after his Porsche car rammed into a divider and caught fire on Outer Ring Road in Himayatsagar.

Hindustan Times link | Archived Link

Conclusion

It is clear from the above factcheck that the image of the accident that is going viral is actually from India and from 2015. The claim that this is an image from Lars Vilks’ fatal car crash is False.