BRITISH NEWS OUTLETS yesterday widely reported the deaths of two British-born Islamic state militants in a drone strike carried out by the RAF.
On Monday British PM David Cameron confirmed to Parliament that Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin had been killed in the attack near Raqqa in Syria on 21 August.
Both men had featured prominently in a recruitment video for Isis in June of last year.
However, some confusion has since arisen about the death of one of the men, with a number of news outlets having reported that Reyaad Khan was killed in July of this year.
The reporting of his death by the papers faced criticism on social media for not having shown enough vigilance in reporting the story for the second time.
However, while there had been reports of Khan being killed by an air strike in July, these were not confirmed by UK police or its Foreign Office.
Coverage was based on collated social media reports and local sources that said Khan had been killed by an airstrike alongside two other Britons.
Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College in London tweeted at the time that his organisation was confident that Reyaad Khan had been killed, but that it could not state that categorically.
While covering the story, outlets at the time were careful not to state outright that Khan had been killed, with Guardian journalist Roy Greenslade pointing to the use of qualifiers and single-quotation marks in headlines as evidence of this.
In a statement, The Guardian has stated that, “our original report was couched cautiously to be clear that the claim was not verified by all parties. We have referenced that the original report of Khan’s death was incorrect in the profile we ran today.”
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