The Al Arabiya news website reported yesterday that its Qatar-based rival Al Jazeera removed a story alleging that American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff were not really beheaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The move to scrap the piece followed a report by Al Arabiya News on Friday which outlined the controversial claims made in the Al Jazeera story, deemed by many online commentators as offensive and insensitive. …

The story had suggested that Foley likely fabricated the execution video, despite confirmations from the U.S. government that the video released by ISIS militants was real, and that his masked executioner did “not have the features of common jihadist figures, but he was rather similar to a Hollywood actor.”

The earlier Al Arabiya story reported:

“Perhaps the first thing that draws the attention of the viewer” in the first beheading video is that “Foley was playing the role of champion not the victim only, for he recites a lengthy statement in peerless theatrical performance, and it seems from tracking the movement of his eyes that he was reading a text from an autocue,” the Al Jazeera report said. …

To support the claim that the beheading was “staged,” the Al Jazeera report went into details of the execution. It claimed that a review of the video in slow motion showed that “the knife being moved on the neck of the victim six times triggered no blood.”

Al Jazeera’s credibility has been called into question numerous times, with the network having been previously labelled “an informal tool of [the Government of Qatar’s] foreign policy” by then US ambassador to Qatar, Joseph LeBaron. Despite the network’s much-hyped launch of Al Jazeera America last year, the channel has failed to find much of an audience in the United States.

Qatar has been accused of financing ISIS.