After an independent investigation into yesterday's stunning report by The Smoking Gun that the LAT had managed to be duped by a federally incarcerated Turtle-like, who forged FBI documents implicated Sean "Puffy" Combs's entourage in the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur at the Quad Recording Studios in Times Square (five bullets, including one through his head and one through his scrotum), the paper has now officially issued on apology:

Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon.

"In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job," Philips said in a statement Wednesday. "I'm sorry."

In his statement, Duvoisin added: "We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck's. I deeply regret that we let our readers down."

The humiliating gaffe is but another notch on the scoreboard for the LAT's chief rivalry in the ongoing East Coast/West Coast newspaper wars; members of the NY Times's thug posse are reportedly having copies of the apology mounted in every department, where it will hang alongside their framed Platinum "Most Dangerous Motherfucker Paper of Record" Pulitzer.

• The Times apologizes over article on rapper [LAT]

Tags: apologies | lat | sean combs