Roach Tale Turns Out to Be Crawling With Errors, so Paper Steps on It

JERUSALEM — The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday retracted a news story about an Israeli housewife’s battle with a cockroach, saying it could not substantiate the report, and apologized to readers.

The report last Thursday was challenged by readers who said it sounded like an old joke.

According to the account, a frightened wife threw a cockroach into a toilet and sprayed insecticide on it when it refused to die. Her husband later dropped a cigarette butt into the toilet, igniting the fumes and “seriously burning his sensitive parts.”

The story said ambulance attendants, shaking with laughter over the incident, dropped the man’s stretcher down the stairs, breaking his pelvis and ribs.

“The Post was not the victim of a deliberate hoax,” the newspaper said in a statement. “Rather, a good tale got so tangled in the telling that it assumed a newsworthiness it should never have had. We regret any inconvenience this might have caused.”

The Post’s Tel Aviv bureau chief said his paper had not yet decided whether to discipline the reporter who heard the story and wrote it without checking.