An amateur Irish football club has had to apologise, after falsely reporting that one of their former players had died in a traffic incident.
Dublin-based Ballybrack FC had their Leinster Senior League (LSL) match against Arklow Town postponed, after the club announced Spaniard Fernando Nuno LaFuente had died in a motorcycle crash.
The league placed a notice in Irish newspaper The Herald, while rival teams observed a moment's silence before their matches.
But reports of LaFuente's demise proved incorrect, after he wrote to the club.
"My work started sending me all these news articles - that's how I found out I was dead," LaFuente told Irish radio station Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTE).
"As soon as I heard the news, I wrote to them. They got straight back to me and told me what was going on, and they apologised.
"I had to call my mum straight away and she basically didn’t know anything. She saw this morning my photo on all the newspapers.
"I haven’t spoken with her yet, because she didn’t answer any of the messages I sent.
"I was aware there was going to be some story on me, but I thought it was going to be me breaking a leg or something like that.
"I was at home yesterday after my work finished. I was playing some video games. They told me: 'You're a celebrity'.
"It was OK, because it was a broken leg, I thought. I didn't care because, I wasn't there any more. If I wasn't getting in any kind of trouble, why should I care?
"These little lies, everyone tells once in a while."
Ballybrack FC later apologised for the incorrect reports of LaFuente's death.
The club said it made "a gross error of judgement has occurred emanating from correspondence sent from a member of the senior set-up management team".
It added the "grave and unacceptable mistake was completely out of character, and was made by a person who has been experiencing severe personal difficulties, unbeknownst to any other members of the club".
League chairman David Moran said an investigation into the matter had been launched.
"We were told he was flown back to Spain on Saturday," he told RTE. "Straight away, that rang alarm bells for us.
"How would you die early on Friday morning and be flown back to Spain on the Saturday?
"It started to unravel then. We rang and we couldn’t get any answers out of them [the club].
"We checked the hospitals, we checked everywhere. Nobody could find anything about this young fella.
"Obviously, some of his teammates released stuff on social media, saying he went back to Spain four weeks ago."
Newshub.