The New York Times said on Saturday it had identified the wrong man as the hooded prisoner standing on a box in a photograph that came to symbolise US military abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
The newspaper's March 11 profile about Ali Shalal Qaissi was challenged by online magazine Salon.com, which said an Army investigation had concluded the prisoner was a different man.
"The Times did not adequately research Mr Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph," The Times said in an editor's note accompanying a front page story on the misidentification.
"A more thorough examination of previous articles in The Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box, raising suspicions about Mr Qaissi's claim," it said.
The Times, one of the most respected US newspapers, was stung in 2003 when former reporter Jayson Blair was found to have fabricated and plagiarised dozens of articles.
Last year, the resignation of star reporter Judith Miller amid questions about her reporting in the run-up to the Iraq war further damaged the paper's standing.
In last Saturday's article, Qaissi, a former Baath Party official, described how he was arrested in October 2003 and held for nearly six months at Abu Ghraib. It said prison records confirmed he was in detention at the time.
The Times said other media outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, had accepted Qaissi's account and identified him as the prisoner in the photograph.
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