The spoof story, which was retracted only after it started to flood news agencies around the world and lead bulletins across all the BBC's UK television and radio channels, was thought to reveal a horrifying level of current affairs ignorance on the broadcaster's shopfloor.

But some say the BBC's very public fumble is not really its fault and merely an unfortunate happenstance.

The sequence of events that unchangeably carried the BBC further down the road to disaster started when an unnamed BBC World television producer started to research the history of the Bhopal disaster. The producer clicked their way through to a false website, run by a part-spoof-part-satire-part-malice twosome called The Yes Men. On being asked, The Yes Men helpfully provided contact details for the Dow Chemicals spokesman. Unsurprisingly, when the producer made initial phone contact, it was The Yes Men's telephone that rang.

Bemused commentators said the hoax, should have rung alarm bells sooner than the hours after Finisterra was live on air, sensationally reversing Dow Chemical's position by claiming full responsibility for the Bhopal tragedy.

Jude Finisterra's very name was a giveaway because Jude is the patron saint of lost causes and Finisterra is a Mexican landmark that translates as the end of the Earth.

Finisterra's comments, which overturned Dow Chemical's long-stated policy and used jokily inappropriate terminology about the planned closure of Union Carbide, "nightmare for the world" was clearly another indication he wasn't a so-called "corporate suit" hired to express company policy.