I admit to being half awake when I spotted this and alerted my newsdesk. I called a colleague in Berlin who immediately sounded scepitcal, then I reached the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem which told me the story sounded very dodgy to them as well.

Firstly the man would have been too young to be a senior SS officer and secondly they had never heard of the Marsha Tikash Whanaab concentration camp. The German honorary consul's office in Goa sounded equally perlexed when I called. They were aware of the reports - indeed they had been posted on the front of a number of regional newspapers - but they had no information.

Oddly, all the local police quoted in the story also said they had no information about the arrest of the Nazi, said to have moved to India two years ago after living in Argentina and Yemen.

I then reread the stories and the penny started to drop. The source of the story was a press release allegedly issued by a German intelligence unit called the Perus Narkp. I Googled both this alleged organisation and the concentration camp and came up blank.

It struck me that it would be very odd for an internationally wanted Nazi's capture to be revealed to the world simply by means of an email. Also Perus Narkp did not look very German. [That's probably because it's an anagram for Super Pranks.] It was at this point that I told my editors that the story was almost certainly a load of cobblers.

As it turns out the entire affair was a hoax set up by the website Pen Pricks, a blog that routinely criticises the Goan media for its reporting.

It seems safe to say then that no 88-year-old former Nazi called Johann Bach, who has a thing for old pianos was arrested by the police in Goa over the weekend. The Pen Pricks blogsite was last night promising that on Tuesday it will be revealing how and why so many of the Indian and Goan newspapers fell for the prank. I'm just glad I didn't fall for it entirely as I was already half-way there.