Iraqi journalist recants claim that 11 family members were killed

[Newsjock]

Source: McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD — An Iraqi journalist who'd claimed Monday that gunmen had killed 11 family members in Baghdad recanted Friday, saying there'd been no massacre and that the only person who'd been killed was a brother-in-law who died between Kut in the south and Baghdad.

Dhia al Kawazz, who publishes a Web site from Amman, Jordan, said his initial claim — which was widely reported, including by McClatchy — was based on false information. Family members said he'd lied to get his family refugee status in Jordan.

Kawazz's story has been challenged all week, first by the police, then the government and then by his own mother. The Iraqi police issued a warrant for Kawazz's arrest through Interpol for claiming that police had threatened his family's lives, according to Abdel Karim Khalaf, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior.

... Ibrahim Saraj, the head of the Association to Defend Iraqi Journalist's rights, said he wasn't yet willing to reverse his protests about the case. He went door to door Friday looking for the house in which the family supposedly was killed in north Baghdad.


Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/22373.html

[gratuitous]

1. I'm glad his family wasn't massacred

Odd that in "improving" Iraq that a journalist would be trying to desperately to spirit his family out of the country, but whatchagonnado? :shrug:

If this had been a reactionary right lie, however, the Bush administration would have already sprung into action and dozens, if not hundreds, of completely innocent folks would have been massacred right back (cf. the "babies tossed from incubators" story that was the casus belli for Gulf War I: The Prelude) for a massacre that never happened.