HOAX: How bloggers outed Amina creator Tom MacMaster

Yesterday evening, Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old American graduate student at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, revealed that Amina -- a renowned voice on gay life in Syria and the ongoing popular movement against the Assad regime -- was one of several personas he had carefully engineered in what he called "a hoax that got way out of hand."

The torrid love affair, the Zina, the pale and pretty lesbians in bikinis-- all were figments of MacMaster's imagination.

Amina was well known to big names in American media. But not well known enough.

Liz Henry, a blogging veteran who says she has uncovered several sockpuppets like MacMaster's in her career, was instrumental in uncovering the Amina hoax and quite possibly pushing MacMaster to post an apology to the people Amina's words effected.

"Just simply Googling her turned up slightly odd information," Henry said in an interview with the International Business Times.

On June 6, a poster on Amina's blog professing to be Amina's cousin Rania said that Amina was kidnapped by what she believed to be plainclothes Syrian security forces, loyal to the Assad regime, provoking an uproar in mainstream American media and a Facebook group calling to "Free Amina," which had 14,134 followers as of 9:30AM today and 13,809 by 3PM.

"Media stories about her disappearance had only one source. The only source was Amina's blog," Henry said.

Henry's sources told her US State Department officials had searched for the dual Syrian-American citizen's records in vain.

Many in the Web community were outraged when Henry published statements on her blog  Composite suggesting that the allegedly imperiled blogger didn't exist at all.