German mag fires star journo for ‘grand’ fabrications

German magazine Der Spiegel said Wednesday it had fired an award-winning journalist for fabricating “on a grand scale” in his articles, weaving invented quotations and characters into over a dozen major articles.

Reporter and editor Claas Relotius confessed to creating the falsehoods after an investigation by the magazine, Der Spiegel said in a statement. The magazine is one of Europe’s leading news publications.

The articles with false or manipulated material include several that were nominated for journalism prizes, or won them, including articles about Iraqi children kidnapped by the Islamic State, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, and Syrian orphans forced to work in a Turkish sweat shop.

“Claas Relotius committed his deception intentionally, methodically,” Der Spiegel said, inserting into his articles made-up dialogue, people he had never met and “composite characters of people who actually did exist but whose stories Relotius had fabricated.”

Relotius, 33, had been writing for the magazine since 2011, and he admitted to making up parts of at least 14 articles in Der Spiegel. That figure could rise, the magazine added. Relotius wrote almost 60 articles for Der Spiegel, and as a freelancer wrote for a variety of German-language newspapers and magazines. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The magazine said concerns were first brought to its editors in November by another journalist, Juan Moreno, who reported with Relotius on an article about a vigilante group operating at the US border with Mexico. Der Spiegel has added notes to Relotius’ articles, saying they will remain unchanged until an investigation is completed.

The case has recalled other cases of fabrication in journalism, including those by Stephen Glass, a magazine writer whose inventions were found out in 1998.