The photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners published by the
Daily Mirror turn out to have been staged, as was speculated since the photos
first saw the light of day. The board of the
Daily Mirror has apologized for printing them and fired its editor, Piers Morgan. Tip-offs that the photos were fake included:
- One soldier was carrying a type of rifle not issued to soldiers in Iraq
- The soldiers were wearing the wrong type of hat
- One of the vehicles shown in a photo was a type not deployed in Iraq
- There was no sweat or injuries on the prisoner who had supposedly been tortured for eight hours
- The people in the pictures looked like they were standing still and posing
The BBC also has an
interesting, short article detailing other famous cases in which newspapers have been hoaxed, the most famous instance probably being the 1983 case of the
Hitler Diaries.
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