Hillary Clinton yesterday acknowledged she "misspoke" about the level of danger she was exposed to on a 1996 visit to Bosnia, leading the campaign of her rival, Barack Obama, to accuse her of exaggerating her foreign policy experience.

The Democratic presidential hopeful, who made the trip while she was first lady, said last week she had come under sniper fire when landing at Tuzla airport.

"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base," she said in a speech last Monday.

But an American comedian who accompanied her on the trip and a contemporaneous news account both contradicted her claims.

The comedian, Sinbad, recently told the Washington Post he had felt no sense of danger.

"I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place?'" he said. "I never felt I was in a dangerous position."

The Associated Press reported at the time that Clinton "took no extraordinary risks on the trip" and did not mention gunfire.

Clinton yesterday acknowledged to the Philadelphia Daily News that there was what she called a "minor blip" in her account of the visit.

"I went to 80 countries, you know," she told the paper's editorial board. "I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things — millions of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement."

The Obama campaign questioned whether she had made a verbal mistake, painting her statement as part of "a growing list of instances in which Senator Clinton has exaggerated her role in foreign and domestic policymaking".

Clinton has branded herself the more experienced candidate in the Democratic race, laying claim to more than 30 years of work in the public sphere and saying she would be "ready on day one".

But more than 11,000 pages of daily records from Clinton's eight years as first lady show she was often far from the scene of presidential decision-making, remaining on holiday, for instance, when her husband, Bill Clinton, returned to Washington to handle a crisis.

She and Obama are battling fiercely in the state of Pennsylvania, where voters go to the polls on April 22. Obama leads in the delegate count, by 1,620 to 1,499. The number of delegates needed to clinch the presidential nomination is 2,024.

Obama is also ahead in the popular vote, leading by about 711,000 votes, 2.6% of ballots cast, according to an analysis by RealClearPolitics.com.