The Los Angeles Times announced it had decided to retract an article that linked associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs with the attack on rapper Tupac Shakur in 1994, and implied that Combs had known about it before it happened.

The newspaper said it had removed the article because the story “relied heavily on information that The Times no longer believes to be credible.”

Towards the end of March, the paper also apologized for publishing the story written by journalist Chuck Philips.

Immediately after the story was published, Combs called it “beyond ridiculous and ... completely false,” insisting he was innocent and had nothing to do with the assault on Shakur.

The Smoking Gun, a site that usually uncovers news from legal documents, said, in the week following the story’s publication, that it believed the FBI documents used by Philips were false. The site claimed that the documents had been fabricated by James Sabatino, a jail inmate charged with wire fraud and leading illegal businesses.

LA Times soon removed from its website all the materials related to Philips’ story.

"To the extent these publications could be interpreted as creating the impression that Combs was involved in arranging the attack, The Times wishes to correct that misimpression, which was neither stated in the article nor intended," the paper explained, in its apologetic note.

Even though it afterwards proved to be false, the story attracted almost 1 million hits on the Los Angeles Times’ website at the time, more than any other article had attracted this year on the newspaper’s site.

Shakur was badly wounded in the 1994 attack, but survived it, dying two years later in a shooting in Las Vegas.