Sexing up a story

A Muslim was "beaten to death" in Nottingham. To the Guardian, there's some doubt for the reason.

Nottinghamshire police described the incident as racially aggravated, not as Islamophobic, angering Muslim groups and surprising some senior officers.

The real story ought to be whether the Guardian is sexing up the story, as several paragraphs down there is this somewhat less incendiary description of what happened.

According to several sources, the man had gone to a shop around 4.30pm on Sunday to buy cigarettes, and the youths had asked him to hand them over.

When he refused they shouted that he was Taliban, a reference to the hardline Muslim government that ran Afghanistan and harboured al-Qaida terrorists.

The man was punched and fell to the ground and later died in hospital.