A LEADING American newspaper apologised yesterday for publishing apparently fake photographs of US soldiers gang-raping Iraqi women.

The Boston Globe, which is owned by The New York Times, gave readers a jolt at the breakfast table by printing the sexually explicit photographs, clearly showing men in camouflage penetrating unidentified women.

The images accompanied a report on a press conference called by a local councillor to call for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary.

Chuck Turner, the councillor, said he had received the photographs from a “very legitimate person”. Sadiki Kambon, an activist who appeared alongside him, said the images came from a representative of the Nation of Islam, a black Muslim group.

The Boston Globe’s report noted that the photographs “bear no characteristics that would prove the men are US soldiers or that the women are Iraqis. And there is nothing apparent in the images showing they were taken in Iraq.”

Other media refused to publish the images. The photographs were quickly traced to pornographic websites. The internet-based WorldNetDaily, which first reported on the pictures a week before they appeared in The Boston Globe, said they came from an American site called Iraq Babes and the Hungary-based Sex in War.

They had already been picked up by Arabic newspapers and Arabic-language websites, including one produced in France by the Committee for the Defence of Saddam Hussein, which called them an “unedited” record of US military abuse.

In its apology yesterday, The Boston Globe said: “Images contained in the photograph were overly graphic, and the purported abuse portrayed had not been authenticated.” Readers flooded the news- paper with complaints. “It’s been too many phone calls and e-mails for me to keep count of,” Christine Chinlund, the newspaper’s ombudsman, said. “It has been a very strong response.

Readers are shocked, angry, upset.”

After surfing the web herself, she said: “It seems they were posed photos for a dubious website, but I need to confirm that.”

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