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MONTREAL – François Bugingo was a Quebec media star, a seemingly fearless foreign correspondent with a knack for showing up in the heart of the action.

He was an eyewitness to a gruesome execution after the fall of Libya’s Gadhafi regime. He came under fire from al-Shabaab militants in Mogadishu in 2011. A year earlier, he had been dispatched to Mauritania to negotiate the release of a journalist held hostage by al-Qaida.

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As early as 1993, at the age of 19, he had been on the front lines in Sarajevo, holed up with a Serbian sniper who drank brandy and played guitar into the night.

But on the weekend, Bugingo’s swashbuckling reputation unravelled as La Presse published an investigation revealing that these and several of his other exploits appear to have been invented.

The TVA network, the Journal de Montréal and 98.5 FM – all of whom featured Bugingo’s work regularly – announced his immediate suspension pending internal investigations.