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One of Germany's leading news outlets has fired an award-winning journalist after accusing him of investing facts in a number of articles.

Der Spiegel magazine said some of the 60 stories that reporter Claas Relotius had written since 2011 were accurate, but others were “completely invented or embellished with manipulated quotes or other fact-fantasy”.

“Truth and lie are muddled in his texts,” the Hamburg-based publisher wrote about Relotius, a 33-year-old class writer who was known for his vivid investigative stories.

The reporter previously worked for other German and Swiss publications and won numerous awards, including CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014.

The magazine said Relotius admitted fabricating parts of at least 14 stories.

Among the “fake news” stories were articles about a wrongfully detained Guantanamo inmate, children kidnapped by Islamic State and a woman attending the execution of a death sentence as a witness.

Der Spiegel said it had immediately terminated his work contract after the journalist admitted that some of his articles included made-up material from interviews that never happened.

Concerns were first raised when a fellow journalist working with him on a story found that supposed interviews had never taken place.

Further fabrications by Relotius included a phone interview with the parents of American football player Colin Kaepernick, who protested police brutality by kneeling during the pre-game singing of the national anthem.

Another was reporting that a sign on the edge of Minnesota town read “Mexicans Keep Out”.

Relotius most recently won an award in early December, for a story about a child in war-torn Syria.

The German reporters' association, which handed out the award, said it was "aghast" and "angry" about the news.

Die Spiegel said the case, which is still being investigated, "marks a low point in the 70-year history of Der Spiegel,” adding: “Claas Relotius acted with intent, methodically and with a high level of criminal energy.

"The management of Der Spiegel will appoint a committee of internal and external experts.”

Reloitus, who had written about and cited people he had never met or spoken to, reportedly told his editors that “it was not about having the next big thing. It was fear of failing”.

“The pressure not to fail became bigger the more successful I became,” he said, according to Der Spiegel.

The German Journalists' Union DJU called the case "the biggest fraud scandal in journalism since the Hitler diaries" that Germany's Stern magazine published in 1983 and were later found to be forgeries.

Die Spiegel's revelations echoed past instances of journalistic fraud by reporters elsewhere, including Jayson Blair of The New York Times, Christopher Newton of The Associated Press and Janet Cooke, whose 1980 piece about a child addicted to heroin won The Washington Post writer a Pulitzer Prize before it was exposed as untrue.

Relotius didn't immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.