German news magazine Der Spiegel has retracted a number of false reports of a dead Syrian child on the Greek border after the Greek Migration Minister insisted the reports were erroneous.
The magazine published the retraction on Friday, clarifying that several articles published last year by the magazine had contained incorrect information on the alleged death of a Syrian child on an island in the Evros river, which separates Turkey and Greece.
The articles had originally blamed Greek authorities for the death of a five-year-old Syrian girl after Greek authorities had reportedly refused assistance to migrants stuck on the small island.
“As a result of the failure to provide assistance, even a five-year-old Syrian girl died. Spiegel saw in the child a symbolic figure for the suffering of refugees at the EU’s external borders and presented this accordingly in its reporting,” the magazine said.
However, the reports were later challenged by Greek Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi, who wrote a letter to the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel noting that the migrants in question has not been on Greek territory and that no one had, in fact, died.
A German ombudsman also launched an investigation into the reports after a complaint from a reader and found the report to be factually incorrect.
“The Ombudsman evaluated numerous internal documents, videos and photos with metadata, chat logs, e-mails, audio files, satellite recordings and other documents, spoke to many people involved and came to the conclusion that we actually made mistakes,” the magazine said.
“We did not correctly describe the situation in our article.”
The report is not the first time Der Spiegel has been caught engaging in fake news reporting in recent years. In 2017, the magazine corrected false claims that anti-mass migration activists in Paris had been arrested during a demonstration after Breitbart News pointed out that those arrested had been far-left extremists.
The most well-known case of fake news involving the magazine came a year later in 2018 when reporter Claas Relotius was revealed to have distorted or entirely invented stories about the United States — stories which won Relotius a journalism award from broadcaster CNN.