Boston bomb: Reddit apologises for identifying wrong suspects

The site, which hosts entries submitted by its users, incorrectly identified an Indian American student as being "Suspect Number Two" in the images released by the FBI. The photo turned out to show Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old eventually arrested and charged with the attacks.

It also claimed to have "discovered" the name of another of the bombers - a man who was also unconnected to the attacks.

The website, which was founded in Boston in 2005, begun a "Find the Boston Bombers" thread on its site. Traffic to the website peaked when Dzhokhar was captured, with 272,000 users on the site.

The student incorrectly identified had gone missing in Boston about a month prior to the attacks, and his name was soon trending worldwide on Twitter. His sister told NBC News that Reddit is "one of the more ugly and disgusting places that had a lot of traffic" relating to her brother.

"We have apologised privately to the family of (the) missing college student, as have various users and moderators," wrote Erik Martin, Reddit's general manager, in a post to the site's official blog. "We want to take this opportunity to apologise publicly for the pain they have had to endure."

The site also named another American as being responsible for the attacks, leading to a flurry of erroneous reporting.

The post on the official blog continued: "A few years ago, Reddit enacted a policy to not allow personal information on the site. This was because "let's find out who this is" events frequently result in witch hunts, often incorrectly identifying innocent suspects and disrupting or ruining their lives.

"We hoped that the crowd-sourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong.

"The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different."

The Associated Press newswire also admitted that it had made mistakes.

"We took a shellacking, a deserved one, for reporting that a suspect was in custody when, as the hours passed, that information began to look wobbly," said Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of AP, in a staff memo, obtained by The Huffington Post.

"We did carry strong denials from named sources, but we got too caught up in telling readers precisely who-said-what and what had and had not happened. Once we were no longer certain of what we had reported we should have told our audiences that in a clear way. And moved a correction more quickly than we did."