Disturbing visuals of a car crash which set a vehicle on fire on a highway in western Russia's Udmurt Republic is being falsely linked to the death of Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who died in an accident on October 3, 2021.
Lars Vilks, a 75-year old Swedish visual artist, died in a car crash near the southern town of Markaryd, Sweden. Vilks stirred worldwide controversy in 2007 for his drawings depicting Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog. According to reports, Swedish police are still investing the cause of death and said that they have no evidence suggesting the collision was intentional.
The viral video shows horrific visuals of people dousing flames of a car that caught fire after a collision. Cries of help from people trapped inside the car can be heard. BOOM found that the incident happened in 2014 when a person died of burn injuries after being trapped inside a car on a highway to Izhevsk, capital of Udmurtia of western Russia.
The video has been shared on Facebook with a caption, "Lunatic Sweden cartoonist screams while burning to death."
The video contains disturbing visuals. Discretion advised.
Click here to see the video.
The video has been uploaded on YouTube as well by a channel named "Pure Islam" with the title "Sweden cartoonist screams while burning to death."
BOOM also received the video for verification via its WhatsApp helpline.
Fact Check
BOOM ran a reverse search with keyframes of the video and found that it is not linked with the death of artist Lars Vilks.
We found the same video uploaded on September 23 , 2014 on a YouTube channel Sergey Sergey with a caption in Russian that reads, "Road accident 09/21/2014. The Izhevsk-Mozhga highway, the man was burnt alive!!!"
Taking a cue from this, we found a video uploaded by Russian Broadcaster REN TV on September 22, 2014 with the title, "The driver burnt down alive on the highway near Izhevsk." (Original title in Russian: На трассе под Ижевском сгорел заживо водитель)
By doing caption search we found several news reports on the incident.
Russian media Fontanka reported about the the car collision which happened on September 21, 2014 on Izhevsk-Mozhga highway (Mozhginsky district of the Izhevsk region). Izhevsk is the capital city of Udmurtia.
REN TV reported eyewitness accounts of the incident which stated, "The car was crushed by a loaded wagon. There were not enough automobile fire extinguishers. They tried to douse the fire with water, but failed to douse completely and eventually the driver died."
Another Udmertian media Izhevsk news Life reported , "Police lodged a criminal case on the accident. The deceased was identified as a 39-year-old resident of Izhevsk."
Reports of the incident can be read on NTV and Komsomolskaya Pravda.