Sunday Times reporter Hala Jaber, one of Britain's most respected foreign correspondents, has admitted that she was hoaxed by a videotape she thought showed the beheading of a fellow journalist and friend.
On the weekend Jaber retracted a report she had written three weeks ago about the brutal execution of Atwar Bahjat, one of the country's top television journalists and her friend.
"Three weeks ago in these pages, I reported that I had seen a video recording of a friend and colleague, Atwar Bahjat, one of Iraq's top female journalists, having her throat cut and then being decapitated," Jaber wrote in the Sunday Times.
"I was mistaken. It was a hoax, and I apologise to her family for the pain I have caused them and to the many readers who were distressed by what I wrote."
Jaber, British Press Awards foreign journalist of the year for the past two years running, had written graphically of the death of her friend. "It was reported at the time that she had been shot dead with her cameraman and sound man. We now know that it was not that swift for Bahjat."
Bahjat's TV network, Al Arabiya, immediately denied Jaber's version of events and the blog the Jawa Report linked the Nepalese video with the one seen by Jaber.
Following queries about the video, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Media Watch TV programme, Jaber wrote her follow up piece.
Some may see this as an adjunct to the debate about reporting in Iraq, prompted by fomer BBC correspondent Rageh Omaar and BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, but Jabar sees the hoax and the wider debate about the difficulties of reporting in Iraq as utterly connected.
She wrote: "It may seem the simplest of hoaxes, but in an Iraq polarised between factions vying to blame each other it has become more and more difficult to corroborate information."
