ITV admits video game footage used in IRA film

ITV has admitted that a documentary about the IRA mistakenly used a scene from a video game and claimed it was a real IRA attack.

Last night’s Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA discussed how deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi sent weapons to the IRA in the mid-1980s.

The documentary may have included lifted footage from the internet that shows a clip from a military simulation game called Arma II, but described it incorrectly as footage of a 1988 IRA attack on a British Army helicopter.

An ITV spokesman said last night: “The events featured in Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers. This was an unfortunate case of human error for which we apologise.”

The programme was removed from ITV’s online catch-up service yesterday when gamers recognised computer-generated video.

The hour-long investigation was produced by ITV’s own ITV Studios.

“With Gaddafi’s heavy machine guns, it was possible to shoot down a helicopter, as the terrorists’ own footage of 1988 shows,” the narrator, the actor Paul McGann, said.

“This was what the security forces feared most. It may have been a lucky hit, but for the army and crew, once was enough. No one died in this attack but there were many other deadly arms to fear.”

Arma 2 was released in 2009 and is set in a post-nuclear apocalypse eastern Europe. The footage used by ITV was posted to YouTube with a title claiming that it was footage of an IRA attack on a British helicopter.

The YouTube clip claims to show at attack by the South Armagh Brigade at Silverbridge, with the supposed IRA figures firing heaving machine guns from the back of a military truck.

A spokesperson for ITV said the producers had real footage, but used the game sequence by mistake.

A spokesman for Bohemia Interactive, the company behind Arma 2, told The Daily Telegraph:

“We’ve had requests in the past to use Arma 2 footage for scenes in a documentary and the request was turned down because of the possibility it showed Arma 2/Bohemia Interactive in a negative way.”