Breaking news: Indian police arrests Nazi Johann Bach.

For those of you not up to speed with the latest on Nazi war criminals, Indian newspapers have been reporting the capture of an 88 year old Nazi called Johann Bach.

The news was reported first in a Goan newspaper and then picked up by the national media. Every newspaper reported it, including the Deccan Herald, Asian Age and Times of India.

And you know what? It turned out to be a hoax. Set up by the daredevils at PenPricks (hats off to you, guys) to expose the sheer incompetency and rumour-mongering that is prevalent in the reporting by the Indian media, the press release told of how an 88 year old European was caught while escaping in the forests near the Goan border. Read the blog post on PenPricks here. The 'How did we go about it' part was especially funny.

While none of the newspapers seems to have bothered NDTV, for one, seems to have a working fact checking department. They saw through the prank, as this report shows.

Moral of the story: Don't believe everything you read in the papers. And the shriller a news-report, the more rumours are going into it (Star News, please note).