Hillary Clinton has been forced to retract a claim that she landed under sniper fire in Bosnia 12 years ago after a CBS video emerged contradicting her account, Hannah Strange writes.

The former First Lady was attacked by Barack Obama for exaggerating her role in foreign policy-making during her husband’s presidency, which she has frequently asserted makes her more qualified to lead than her Democratic rival.

During a speech on Iraq last week, Mrs Clinton said of the March 1996 trip: “I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

But the video of her arrival shows Mrs Clinton and her daughter Chelsea smiling and waving as they walked at a leisurely pace across the tarmac from a cargo plane, stopping to shake hands with Bosnia’s acting president and listen while an 8-year-old girl read out a poem.

The comedian Sinbad, who along with singer Sheryl Crowe accompanied Mrs Clinton on the goodwill mission, told The Washington Post he had no recollection either of the threat or reality of gunfire.

CBS, whose correspondent also attended the trip, said Mrs Clinton had "greatly misstated" what happened. The news network added: "There was no sniper fire either when Clinton visited two army outposts, where she posed for photos. And no sniper fire back at the base, where she sang in a USO show starring Sinbad and Sheryl Crowe."

Mrs Clinton insisted yesterday that she had simply misspoken, characterising the false claim as a “minor blip” among the “millions of words” she spoke every day.

Asked about the issue during a meeting with the Philadelphia Daily News’ editorial board, she said: “I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book.

“You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things – millions of words a day – so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement,” she said.

But Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the Obama camp, argued that the claim was not simply a slip of the tongue as it was made in “prepared remarks” during the Iraq speech.

“When you make a false claim that’s in your prepared remarks, it’s not misspeaking, it’s misleading,” Mr Vietor said.

“It’s part of a troubling pattern of Senator Clinton inflating her foreign policy experience."

Howard Wolfson, a Clinton spokesman, counterclaimed that the comments were made ahead of the speech proper, and accused the Obama campaign of raising the issue only because “they have nothing positive to say about their candidate”.

Amid a slew of mocking news reports and replays of the contradictory footage, he insisted that the trip, designed as a morale-booster for US troops maintaining the peace after Bosnia’s civil war, had taken Mrs Clinton into a “potential combat zone".

He recalled the New York senator’s book, “Living History,” in which she described a welcoming ceremony at Bosnia’s Tuzla Airbase which was curtailed due to the risk of attack.

“Due to reports of snipers in the hills around the airstrip, we were forced to cut short an event on the Tarmac with local children, though we did have time to meet them and their teachers and to learn how hard they had worked during the war to continue classes in any safe spot they could find,” she wrote.

Mr Wolfson said: “That is what she wrote in her book. That is what she has said many, many times and on one occasion she misspoke.”

However the issue threatened to overshadow Mrs Clinton’s attempt to bring voters’ attention back to the faltering economy, as she outlined her plan to prevent the US mortgage crisis spiralling into a full-blown recession.

Mrs Clinton’s recollections of her involvement in several foreign crises, which she claims leave her more prepared than her rival to be commander-in-chief, have come under scrutiny since the publication last week of more than 11,000 pages of schedules from her years in the White House.

The documents have so far failed to shed much light on her assertions that as First Lady she played a key role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland or in opening Macedonia’s borders to Kosovo refugees.

They will no doubt be further dissected as the rivals try to land a knock-out blow in an increasingly nasty Democratic contest. Mr Obama currently leads the overall delegate count with 1,620 to Mrs Clinton’s 1,499, but neither is likely to reach the 2,024 needed to clinch the nomination, so must convince superdelegates – senior Democrats free to vote for any candidate at the party’s August convention – that they are the most capable of taking on John McCain in the November election.

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