The fact is, it wasn't just the Sunday Independent and the Sunday World. It was everyone, even the Observer, with most papers going off the back of quotes in the early editions of those papers on a Sunday which produce copies early on Saturday evening,
Certainly it was a monumental fuck up and I do feel sorry for the family, even if their luxurious home and lifestyle has been bankrolled by god knows how many dodgy dealings.
Yet it does display the flaws, to some extent, in the gathering of news information as a whole. Everyone was working off a source from within the Russian police, and it's quite clear that the information was terribly terribly wrong. On Saturday, people had to trust that source, and the cost of being cautious was to risk looking stupid against the competititors who you had to believe had better sources than you did. As it happened, they didn't, but everyone bluffed themselves into running with it.
Even still, I would be curious to hear the interpretor's side of the story and get the full story on why Lawlor was in Moscow in the first place and needed to fly her from Prague to be with him on that journey.