beat each other to death on command.

But how much of the book is true? The newspaper The Australian was contacted by an aid worker and has published a series of stories which suggest: 'Not much'.

They discovered that the rebel attack on Beah's village of Mattru Jong happened not in 1993, as

the book has it, but in 1995, the year before Beah was 'rescued' and taken to the States by Laura Simms, an American writer.

That would mean that Beah (left) could have been a child soldier for only a matter of months, and he would have been 15 at the time - hardly a child in African terms. On Friday, the newspaper found further proof of distortion when they tracked down classroom records showing that Beah was still at school in 1993.

Beah insisted - before the