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New York (AP) - The renowned "New York Times" fell for a con man who pretended to be a former IS fighter.
The stories of the Canadian with a Pakistani background played a key role in a podcast published in 2018 by the newspaper “Caliphate” (“Caliphate”) about the terrorist militia IS.
On Friday (local time) the "New York Times" published a message in which the newspaper admitted that the podcast episodes with the depictions of the man did not meet the journalistic standards of the editors.
The Canadian claimed in the podcast that he himself had committed gruesome crimes for IS in Syria.
The editor-in-chief of the New York Times, Dean Baquet, said the man was "a con man who made up most, if not everything, of what he told us."
It is not the failure of a single reporter, but an institutional failure.
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The reporter in charge of the podcast, Rukmini Callimachi, posted a statement on Twitter apologizing to the audience for what the team missed and what went wrong.
You promise to do better in the future.
After statements by the Canadian in several media, Canadian authorities had started investigations against the man.
He was arrested last September for fraud related to terrorist acts.
A lawsuit is pending against him.
The Canadian authorities said in September that a fraud of this kind could create fear in the population and unnecessarily tie up investigative capacities.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 201219-99-755300 / 2