China's largest state-run news agency has apparently fallen into the all-too-common trap of mistaking obvious porn for hard-boiled news after it tried to pass a series of stills from a fetish film called Lethal Injection as an actual lethal injection taking place in the United States.

In a breathless piece entitled "Actual Record of Female Inmate’s Execution – Exposing the World’s Darkest Side," Xinhua published a slideshow of images it claimed showed capital punishment being carried out somewhere in the US.

The Chinese news blog Out of My Face, which was the first to trace the "photos" back to their source, notes that the full film can be downloaded at the family-friendly sounding porn site XXXRape.net.

Here's how The Hollywood Reporter describes what they've seen:

The sequence of shots shows a scantily clad woman being strapped to a chair and writhing about dramatically, before a sleazy looking pony-tailed “doctor” enters the room to inject a dark liquid into her arm. The woman again flails histrionically and appears to die – what likely happens next in the original film is left to the imagination.

Screw imagination, here's what happens:

Unfortunately, (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), other news outlets both in China and abroad picked up the agency's report before it was ultimately retracted without explanation.

Beijing Cream points out that Xinhua has something of a history of mistaking porn for news:

Last October, we discovered that it was using screengrabs from the porn site Ultimate Surrender in a piece called “Crazy women fighters.”

[screengrabs via Out of My Face, XXXRape.net]