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On 24 December 2017, the disreputable web site Neon Nettle reported that a pedophile priest with HIV who was exonerated by the Catholic Church after raping young children had met a gruesome end when he was crucified: Neon Nettle is a frequent purveyor of viral fake news stories and conspiracy theories, and nothing published on that site should be believed without further investigation. In this case, we found no evidence that a Mexican priest named Jose Garcia Ataulfo was accused of child rape and then crucified, or that such a person even exists at all. The story of the mysterious priest initially found its way into English-language media by way of the British tabloid the Daily Mail, which on 20 September 2016 aggregated a report from Urgente24.com, a Spanish-language news site based in Argentina. That version of the story reported only that Ataulfo had been acquitted by the Catholic Church and thus was never formally prosecuted by Mexican authorities: But the ultimate problem with the story from the get-go was that Urgente24.com also based their article on an unreliable source: a report from the Mexican branch of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Nevertheless, the Daily Mail report was shared thousands of times, taking the unfounded story viral on multiple continents. When the Catholic News Agency (CNA) tried tracking Ataulfo to a source, they came up empty. Mexican archdiocese officials told CNA they couldn't find records matching the description given for Ataulfo, while Father Hugo Valdemar Romero, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of Mexico, told CNA that: The archdiocese told CNA the name may have originally come from a list of allegedly LGBT priests a publication called Hablermos de Mexico had threatened to make public amid a national debate over marriage equality. (We sent an inquiry to the Archdiocese of Mexico but have not yet received a response.) The disturbing image attached to the Neon Nettle story appeared to be a mash-up of a digitally-manipulated picture of a real priest lifted from the web site CourageousPriest.com and, sadly, an image of a man who was murdered in 2014 by Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen after being accused of working for U.S. intelligence. The man's body was hung out in the open over a soccer pitch and grisly images of the results were circulated online. Neon Nettle traffics in sensational and often totally fabricated clickbait, and has a penchant for publishing gruesome but false vigilante stories involving pedophilia. This tale appears to be yet another example of that proclivity.
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