Senior Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway faced ridicule on Friday after she used a TV interview to invent a terrorist attack that never happened, before criticising the media for failing to cover it.

Ms Conway, who coined the term "alternative facts" last month, was defending Mr Trump's Muslim travel ban to MSNBC interviewer Chris Matthews on the basis that Barack Obama had previously blocked refugees from Iraq after two men became "radicalised" and carried out the "Bowling Green massacre".

She described the pair as "the masterminds behind" the supposed Kentucky attack and added: "Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered."

Such a massacre never took place and the Obama administration did not place a six-month ban on Iraqi refugees, as Ms Conway also claimed.

A more stringent screening process was imposed after Mohanad Shareef Hammadi and Waad Ramadan Alwan were arrested for trying to send money to al-Qaeda in 2011. They were later jailed for life and for 40 years, respectively. They had been living in Bowling Green and admitted to participating in IED attacks against soldiers in their home country.

Ms Conway faced a derisive social media reaction on Friday.

One Twitter user mocked the President's counsellor by posting a GIF of a man being struck between the legs by a bowling ball and saying: "I found evidence of the Bowling Green Massacre!"

And author Saladin Ahmed said: "Wow Kellyanne Conway is now on Fox News blaming Muslim immigrants for a nonexistent trilogy of films set before STAR WARS."