Update: The Canadian man who pulled the wool over the eyes of the New York Times, among others, by weaving tales of time spent as an ISIS executioner, admitted to his lies in a Canadian court on Friday. In doing so, Shehroze Chaudhry, now 26, saw the charges against him—perpetrating a hoax involving the threat of terrorism—dropped. His lawyer said Chaudhry's stories "were mistakes borne out of immaturity—not sinister intent and certainly not criminal intent," reports the Times. It was determined that Chaudhry never traveled to Syria or engaged with ISIS. Under the deal, he must keep going to counseling and must live with his parents in Ontario for the next year. Our original story from Dec. 2020 follows:
A big mea culpa from the New York Times: Executive editor Dean Baquet admits that the story of a Canadian man who traveled to Syria and became an ISIS executioner was so compelling that terrorism reporter Rukmini Callimachi and her editors failed to press hard enough to verify it—and ignored some red flags. The Times has now retracted key episodes of its hit 2018 podcast series Caliphate involving Shehroze Chaudhry. After the podcast—in which Chaudhry described executing civilians and attending terrorist training camps—raised concerns in Canada, investigators determined that he had never even been to Syria, the CBC reports.
The 25-year-old was arrested by the Mounties last month and charged with hoax terrorist activity. The Times review found it's possible Chaudhry did go to Syria but at most for a few weeks, and that photos he supplied of ISIS fighters could be found on the internet. Associates in Canada, where Chaudhry works in his family's suburban Toronto kebab shop, describe him as a fantasist, though they say he does hold radical views. Baquet admits that even when facing many holes and inconsistencies in Chaudhry's story, the podcast team tried to find ways that it could still be true.
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"We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes," Baquet tells NPR. "I think we were so in love with it that when when we saw evidence that maybe he was a fabulist, when we saw evidence that he was making some of it up, we didn't listen hard enough." Baquet says Callimachi, a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who joined the Times in 2014, will be reassigned. (More New York Times stories.)
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