THE BBC has come under fire for its reporting of false information during Friday's stabbing in Glasgow.
Six people were injured after an incident at the Park Inn Hotel on West George Street.
While the BBC News channel made it clear in the immediate aftermath of the news breaking that there was limited information available, it was eventually reported that there had been confirmation of three deaths.
The broadcaster's Home Affairs correspondent, Danny Shaw, reported online that he had heard from a "Whitehall source" that three people had been killed in the attack - two having been fatally stabbed and the other being the attacker, who was shot dead by police.
The "confirmation" was then widely reported throughout the day - before it became apparent that the only person to have died was the attacker.
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Coverage was then updated to reflect this, but not before hours' worth of reporting on the "deaths".
In that time, the identities of those involved in the incident had not been identified, with the only information on the supposed killings being that they had been "stabbed to death" in the hotel's stairwell.
It later became clear that those injured in the attack had been taken to hospital, with three being treated at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and another three being treated at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.
The SNP's Alison Thewliss hit out at the news outlet, commenting on Shaw's claims: "The phrase 'a well place [sic] Whitehall source' should have been his first clue that it was bobbins. A huge amount of distress was caused by that reporting."
A BBC spokesperson said: “We took care to cover the tragic events in Glasgow sensitively and it was never our intention to cause distress.
"We had received information from sources in Glasgow and Whitehall that three people had died and this information was relayed during our live coverage.
"When our sources updated their information to say that one person had died and Police Scotland confirmed this to the media, we reported this development across our output and our online article was amended.”
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