Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, BBC, CNN, Times of London, Tom Ridge, the public - who is duping whom ? On November 15, the BBC and the Times of London report Bin Laden's nuclear secrets have been found. The next day CNN also reports nuclear weapons-related documents found in an al Qaeda safe house . Tom Ridge confirms the story. The same day, the Village Voice reports the hoax spotted by the Daily Rotten given their command of thermo nuclear science. God help us all.
posted by Voyageman on Nov 17, 2001 - 13 comments

There's mummies coming from Afghanistan said yesterday's Horizon on the BBC. This is the story of a supposedly 2600 year old mummified Persian princess. It was put up for sale for $11 million, but turned out to be a fraud and possibly contains the remains of a woman murdered in 1996. The mummy was probably manufactured somewhere in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, well known these days....
posted by knutmo on Sep 21, 2001 - 2 comments

A story that only gets stranger and sadder. A gold-masked mummy, whose sensational discovery last year sparked an ownership row between Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, has turned out not only to be a modern fake but also the apparent victim in a macabre murder mystery.
posted by lagado on May 25, 2001 - 3 comments

So have you heard the one about the Golden Persian Princess Mummy? Discovered in October by Pakistani police during a murder investigation of an antiquities smuggler, this story has only gotten weirder. Said to be 2,600-years-old, the body of a young woman has been preserved using the Egyptian mummification process but bears cuneiform inscriptions in Old Persian: "I, daughter of Xerxes, the great king, I am Ruduamna". Since its discovery, the governments of Iran and Afghanistan have each claimed ownership of the mummy and all three countries are now engaged in a bitter war of claim and counter-claim. Now some experts are starting to say that the whole thing looks like it's just an elaborate hoax.
posted by lagado on Dec 26, 2000 - 0 comments