The Los Angeles Times has apologised to Sean "Diddy" Combs over a story linking him to a 1994 attack on fellow rapper Tupac Shakur.

In an article posted on the newspaper’s website, Pulitzer-prize winning reporter Chuck Philips, who wrote the March 17 story, admitted he had fallen for fake documents and was the victim of a hoax.

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

Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin also issued an apology to Combs, who has always denied any involvement in the infamous attack on Shakur.

"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," he said.

No-one was ever charged for the assault on Shakur, in which the rapper was pistol-whipped and shot several times. Rumours about who was responsible have swirled ever since.

The New York incident triggered the notorious feud between East and West Coast rappers that led to a second shooting in September 1996, which killed Shakur, and the death of rapper Notorious BIG in March the following year.

The Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton said the newspaper would launch an internal review of the documents and the reporting surrounding the story.

“The bottom line is that the documents we relied on should not have been used. We apologize both to our readers and to those referenced in the documents and, as a result, in the story. We are continuing to investigate this matter and will fulfil our journalistic responsibility for critical self-examination."

Initial doubts over Philips’s story were raised by US whistle-blowing website The Smoking Gun, who claimed the newspaper had been the victim of a hoax by James Sabatino, a claimed associate of Combs, currently in prison on fraud charges.

The website said Sabatino gave the Los Angeles Times fake FBI reports and criticised Philips for not picking up numerous misspellings and unusual acronyms. The site also claimed the documents were prepared on a typewriter and that the FBI had ceased using typewriters around 30 years ago.

But Philips said he believed the documents were authentic as Sabatino had filed them in a Miami court.

In a letter to the Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller, Combs's lawyer Howard Weitzman demanded a retraction and said he believed that newspaper’s conduct met the legal standard for "actual malice," which would allow Combs to sue for defamation.

Philips has spent years working as a reporter, focusing on the rap business. In 1999, he and fellow journalist Michael Hiltzik won a Pulitzer Prize for their accounts of entertainment industry corruption.

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