How rival exposed Channel 7’s stadium expose

In an e-mail response to Newsline,Barry said his team began the investigation by tracking down the alleged illegal arms vendor. “We found him through a Google search and some phone calls. It took a remarkable piece of investigation and a bit of luck,” he said. A long exchange of e-mails with the dealer followed and it came to the fore that the dealer had been set up by Duffy. To begin with,he was a certified manufacturer of the product. “Mike Duffy misled Mr P (the dealer whose identity has not been revealed) because he told him his name was Mark Darcy and that he was buying equipment for Australian company Ashburton Mining,” said Barry.

After this,a few strongly worded e-mails went back and forth between ABC Television and Channel Seven. In one such email,Lin Buckfield,executive producer,Media Watch,asked Chris Willis,director of news at Channel Seven,if the channel permitted using false measures in news reporting. In his response,Willis said: “Mike was operating undercover. We have to concede that the story might have taken a different turn if he had said ‘I am a Channel Seven journalist investigating the sale of detonation kits freely advertised on the Internet,which in my view could pose a threat to the safety of athletes and spectators at the Commonwealth Games’.”

After speaking with the dealer,the Delhi Police,a reporter from an Indian channel,and Duffy and Willis,the ABC team concluded that the Channel Seven report was a “shocking beat-up”. In its report,the team alleged the arms dealer never sold or gave Duffy any explosives or detonators. Duffy only got the empty suit-case kit from him in which the device is kept. It was this empty suitcase that he took to the stadium. Even his claim that the stadium was under strict security cover was incorrect because it had not been locked for outsiders till then. Besides,Duffy only managed to reach the barricade set up for diverting traffic,the Media Watch report said.

“Mike Duffy misled viewers by saying he had crossed through the police security gate with a suitcase that was ‘no ordinary piece of luggage’. He described the case as ‘a portable purpose-built casing for a remote detonation kit capable of setting off 200 explosions’,” Barry said. He further said the claim that the kit could “flatten an entire building” was also misleading because the dealer was only talking about its potential. “In fact,Duffy had no explosives and no detonator, at most an incomplete kit that could not have blown up anything,” Barry added.

Meanwhile,Duffy has threatened to file a defamation case against ABC.