Terrorist footage was from video game

Dramatic footage purporting to show masked terrorists shooting down a British helicopter in a documentary has been revealed to be a clip from a video game.

The clip was aired by British independent broadcaster ITV during a documentary called Exposure: Kadhafi about how the deposed Libyan leader sent weapons to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the 1980s.

ITV has admitted that it had mistakenly used a clip from a video game and blamed the slip-up on ‘human error’.
 
The clip was in fact from a popular military simulation game called Arma II and was meant to depict US marines fighting rebels in a fictional eastern European nation.

“The events featured in Exposure: Kadhafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers,” an ITV spokesman said. “This was an unfortunate case of human error for which we apologise.”

An ITV source claimed the broadcaster did have real footage of an attack on a helicopter in Northern Ireland, which had been used in an earlier documentary on the channel.

A corrected version of Exposure: Kadhafi would be posted on its website soon, the source added.

In last Monday’s documentary, the shaky footage of masked men firing an anti-aircraft gun from the back of a truck and a helicopter going down in flames was captioned ‘IRA film 1988’.

The head of the company that developed the game reportedly said he did not understand how the error could have occurred.

“I am not sure how they could make such an obvious mistake,” Marek Spanel, chief executive of Bohemia Interactive Studio, was quoted as telling the games website Spong.
 
“On a somewhat more positive note, we consider this as a bizarre appreciation of the level of realism incorporated into our games.”