NewsWire retracts story alleging Pantami’s terrorist ties

The NewsWire, one of the media companies that reported Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Isa Pantami, as being placed on a Terror watch-list has now come out to retract their article.

According to a statement posted on their website, the news website said that an independent audit they conducted found the claims to be baseless.

According to them, “there was no direct attribution by the said United States Government agency”.

NewsWire has now said that they will delete the article from their website and all their media platforms.

Read the full statement here:

“Several concerns have been raised with respect to the veracity of the story alleging Nigeria’s Minister of Com­munications, Sheikh Isa Pantami being placed on Terror watch-list for alleged ties with the late Boko Haram Leader Muhammed Yusuf in our publication.

“We launched an independent audit to evaluate the story and found that there was no direct attribution by the said United States Government agency and we do apologise to our readers for re-publishing the report and also to the person of Sheikh Isa Pantami, Nigeria’s Minister of Com­munications.
“The video embedded in the story where the Minister and the late leader of Boko Haram revealed that the minister and the late Boko Haram leader were in a heated debate. Sheikh Pantami in the video disagreed with Muhammed Yusuf’s position, insisting that Muslims should enrol in schools and equally participate in democratic governance. However, Yusuf argued to the contrary with little evidence from the Qur’an and Hadith which he relied on.

“As an organisation, we always aspire to perform our due diligence in publishing or re-publishing third party articles with credible media organisations and in accordance with the highest ethical and professional guidelines and for this story, we found that story was published by Daily Independent without attribution.

“Based on this development, we are retracting the story and deleting the article from our platforms, news websites and the various social media pages”.