INDIA:SEVERAL NATIONAL and provincial Indian newspapers became embarrassing victims of a hoax earlier this week over the arrest of a supposed 88-year old Nazi war criminal from the beaches of Goa, an account which was categorically confirmed by the local police.
On Sunday, an e-mail message from "Hamman Smit", press officer from "Perus Narpk" - an anagram, for Super Prank - of Shede Road, Berlin, arrived in the inbox of several journalists in Goa and in nearby Bangalore.
It identified itself as the "intelligence wing of the German chancellor's core" that claimed credit for arresting Nazi war criminal Johann Bach, responsible for exterminating 12,000 Jews in the "Marsha Tikash Whanaab" concentration camp days earlier.
The account, carried in bold detail by at least 17 small and major newspapers including the prestigious Indian Express, was full of outlandish detail, including the claim that Bach had revealed his identity to an Israeli couple during a rave party in Goa and had stolen an 18th century piano from a museum in "East Berlin" which he was trying to sell through a local newspaper.
The accounts quoted federal intelligence bureau officials as confirming that Bach had come to India via Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada and Yemen, all the while lugging his precious piano.
As a concession to accurate reporting, however, one leading paper inserted the word "unconfirmed" parenthetically next to Yemen, suggesting that the newspaper had confirmed all other aspects of the story.
The Telegraph, Calcutta's leading daily in eastern India, ran the account under the headline "Goa piano 'thief' found to be Nazi war fugitive". It said Bach, mistaking an Israeli couple holidaying in Goa for Americans, told them he had "managed" a Nazi concentration camp during the war.
The Israelis informed German intelligence who then realised that the museum from where the piano was stolen was close to a concentration camp in Berlin. They already knew that the camp was run by someone named Bach, who was never caught after the war.
The Indian Expresswent one step ahead of its competitors with an exclusive detail noting that the "Nazi war criminal" had already been "airlifted to Berlin". It has since been revealed that the hoax was the handiwork of "Penpricks", a journalists' collective in Goa whose penpricks.blogspot.comis dedicated to discovering "the rotund flanks and the shaggy underbelly of the Goa's media".