by Nuruddeen M. Abdallah
The French international news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) has retracted its story in which Kano emir Muhammadu Sanusi II reportedly tweeted that Boko Haram will be defeated soon.
See erroneous AFP story here
The retraction followed suspension of the Twitter handle found to be fake by a US based journalism teacher and columnist Dr Farooq Kperogi.
In its retraction, AFP posted on its news feed “LAGOS, December 21, 2014 (AFP) – KILL our Nigeria-unrest-religion of December 14, 2014. The Twitter account used as a source for the story was fake. No new version upcoming.”
The story was reproduced in a number of Nigerian newspapers, and none of the said papers published the retraction as at last night.
According to Kperogi “The story was intended to portray the emir as an unapologetic Buhari partisan, which is unusual for northern emirs of Sarkin Kano’s calibre.”
