KEY POINTS:
He is a former child soldier whose account of being a cocaine-addicted killer forced to fight in Sierra Leone's civil war was a literary sensation.
More than 600,000 people have bought Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone, which received rave reviews from authors such as William Boyd and Sebastian Junger, and which was number three in Time magazine's top 10 non-fiction books last year.
Now an Australian newspaper suggests there may be serious flaws in Beah's account of his life as a teenage killing machine, forced to become part of a Government corps of boy soldiers before being rescued by Unicef, the United Nations' children's agency.
It claims that the orphan and teenage survivor of Sierra Leone's civil war, in which tens of thousands of people were massacred and much of the population displaced, appears "mistaken" about the timing of key events related in the book. After carrying out investigations in Sierra Leone, the Australian newspaper alleges that Beah was 15 and not 13 when he was recruited into the Army and that he therefore served only a few months as a child soldier and not two years as claimed in the book.
The inquiries were prompted by an Australian couple who read A Long Way Gone and are admirers of Beah. Mining engineer Bob Lloyd, from Perth, went to Sierra Leone last year to manage the titanium mine where Beah's father used to work and met a man who turned out to be a relative of the former child soldier.
The couple were so pleased with their discovery that they tried to contact Beah. After investigating the story further, they uncovered the discrepancies in dates.
According to the Lloyds, when they contacted Beah's US publishers, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, the Australian distributors, HarperCollins, and Laura Simms, the American woman who eventually fostered Beah, they were treated with hostility. They were then put in touch with the Australian.
The newspaper claims the rebel attack that opens Beah's book and which caused the deaths of his parents and two brothers and led to him becoming a child soldier, happened in 1995, two years after he said it did. Its claims are accompanied by an interview with Beah's teacher Abdul Barry, who insists Beah was at school in 1993 and 1994 - the years when he said he was a child soldier.
Beah, now 28 and living in New York, wrote that he became so morally corrupted that he shot people as easily as he would drink a glass of water.
"If confirmed, these revelations do not mean Beah's tale isn't truly terrible," the Australian said. "They don't mean that he hasn't been through experiences that most of us in the developed world will never have to face even in our nightmares. But this does raise questions about the way Ishmael Beah's book came out and how thoroughly his story was checked out."
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