But isn’t that post-Saddam Iraq?

The British state-run broadcaster BBC has been caught passing off an old photo from Iraq in 2003 for the massacre in the Syrian town of Houla.

In a report published hours after the massacre, the network used an old photo of dead Iraqi children taken in Al Mussayyib that was first published over nine years ago and presented it as a photo of victims of the recent massacre of civilians in the town of Houla in western Syria, The Telegraph reported.

The photo shows a child jumping over the dead bodies of hundreds of Iraqi children who have been transferred from a mass grave to be identified.

Britain's state-funded news network later published the same story with a new photo showing a UN observer looking at the bodies of the Houla victims.

The photographer who took the original picture, Marco Di Lauro, posted on his Facebook page, “Somebody is using my images as a propaganda against the Syrian government to prove the massacre.”

“What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn't check the sources and it's willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone: activist, citizen journalist or whatever. That's all,” the photographer told The Daily Telegraph.

A BBC spokesman says the picture, illustrating Sunday night’s story "Syria Massacre in Houla Condemned as Outrage Grows," was taken down “immediately” when the source was identified.

“We were aware of this image being widely circulated on the internet in the early hours of this morning following the most recent atrocities in Syria. We used it with a clear disclaimer saying it could not be independently verified,” he added.

These words about information “which cannot be independently verified” have become a trademark of media coverage of the 14-month conflict in Syria.

The UN Security Council condemned the violence in Houla during an emergency meeting on Sunday, saying the clashes “involved a series of government artillery and tank shelling on a residential neighborhood.”

However, Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar Ja’afari censured the “tsunami of lies” by some members of the Security Council and said Syrian forces were not to blame for the violence.