MANILA - Grisly newspaper reports about children being killed for their vital organs shot fear through several towns in the northern Philippines but police said it was all a hoax.
The Manila Standard set off a media frenzy on Monday with the front-page headline "5 dead kids: organs missing".
The story described corpses of young victims dumped along roads in Nueva Ecija province after their hearts, livers and kidneys had been cut out for sale on the black market.
"This is not Mexico or Latin America, where organ harvesting has been a practice for decades now," the paper said. "This is right here."
Descriptions were similarly gory in reports by other news outlets on Tuesday but the details were equally vague.
While poor residents of Manila have been known to sell a kidney to raise money, police said the tale of a gang preying on children for their organs was pure fabrication.
The "culprit of this hoax" admitted he made up the story and had sent it to a reporter in a mobile phone text message as a joke, Edgar Aglipay, director of the Philippine National Police, told a radio station.
The man identified by Aglipay had the same name as the lone source of the Manila Standard story on Monday.
"After the report broke out in the newspaper, many teachers and parents expressed fear. Our chief was forced to hold a meeting in the school," said Enrile Vicente, a police officer in the farming community of Gapan.
"TV and radio stations in Manila came here in droves."
