TV news channel mixes up Lost footage and the Air France crash

A Bolivian television news channel has been left red-faced after falling for a Lost hoax.

The station showed photos caught on mobile phone camera of the last minutes of tragic Air France flight AF447.

A Periodistas Asociados de Televisión (PAT) newsreader describes several shots from inside the plane as it broke in half.

The shots show passengers being sucked out of the back of the plane into midair. The team said the "exclusive pictures" were from a recovered Casio Z750.

They claimed the camera was traced via the serial number to its owner "Paulo G Muller, an actor from a well-known children's theatre on the outskirts of Porto Alegre".

But the images were straight from TV show Lost, showing the break-up of fictional Oceanic Flight 815.

Perhaps someone should have noticed Evangeline Lilly in the photos, not to mention the fact that the plane breaks up in daylight ...

The hoax also caught out Dutch radio station BNR and Poland TV station TVN24.

It's not the first time news crews have been caught out.

The same images did the internet rounds in 2006 after a Gol Airlines flight collided mid-air with a private jet over the Amazon jungle.

PAT's news director apologised for the mistake.

"On Thursday, two photographs were aired on our prime-time news report and on Friday we apologised," he said.