REPUTATION IN QUESTION
Reporter’s work under scrutiny
François Bugingo was a Quebec media star, a seemingly fearless foreign correspondent with a knack for showing up in the heart of the action.
He was an eyewitness to a gruesome execution after the fall of Libya’s Gadhafi regime. He came under fire from al-Shabab militants in Mogadishu in 2011. A year earlier, he had been dispatched to Mauritania to negotiate the release of a journalist held hostage by al-Qaida. As early as 1993, at the age of 19, he had been on the front lines in Sarajevo, holed up with a Serbian sniper who drank brandy and played guitar into the night.
But on the weekend, Bugingo’s swashbuckling reputation unravelled as La Presse published an investigation revealing these and several of his other exploits appear to have been invented. TVA, the Journal de Montréal and 98.5 FM announced his immediate suspension.
Aside from Radio-Canada’s reporters, there are few full-time correspondents representing Quebec-based media overseas, and Bugingo, 41, had carved out a niche. A native of Congo, he moved to Montreal in 1997, finding work with Radio-Canada and Radio-Québec before moving on.
In 2010, he spoke at a Montreal conference on peacekeeping, and his biography said he had “covered virtually every conflict of the last 15 years (Rwanda, Algeria, Colombia, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Congo, etc.)” But it was his claim stemming from a more recent conflict that sparked his fall from grace.
La Presse investigative reporter Isabelle Hachey said Monday a February column in the Journal de Montréal set off alarm bells. At the end of the column, Bugingo recounted meeting Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, son of the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi, “a few months ago” in a Libyan prison. “You’ll see. They are all going to have reason to miss my father soon,” Gadhafi was quoted saying.
Having reported from Libya and unsuccessfully tried to interview Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, Hachey knew how hard it was. She was surprised Bugingo would mention such a reporting coup at the end of a column. Questioned by La Presse, Bugingo said it took place not a few months ago but in 2012. Prison officials in Libya told La Presse Gadhafi had not granted any interviews that year. Asked why he had waited three years to report on his meeting, Bugingo said it was because it was a difficult interview, with Gadhafi’s Arabic translated into butchered English. Hachey noted the younger Gadhafi, who studied at London School of Economics, speaks excellent English.
The Gadhafi story opened the gates: In 2014, Bugingo wrote of witnessing the execution in Misrata, Libya, of one of the Gadhafi regime’s worst torturers. Bugingo admitted to La Presse he had not been in Misrata. “I must have read that somewhere,” he said.
In 2011, Bugingo told La Presse he had gone to Mauritania the year before to negotiate a hostage release on behalf of Reporters sans frontières. He described being threatened by an al-Qaida representative. Four past and present directors of RSF told La Presse Bugingo was never sent to negotiate a hostage release.
Through his lawyer, Bugingo said Sunday he was temporarily “withdrawing from the public space” to prepare a response.