An essay that won a six-year-old girl tickets to a Hannah Montana concert has been exposed as a fake.
The essay began with the line: "My daddy died this year in Iraq".
A spokeswoman for the contest's sponsor said the girl's mother told company officials her daughter's father died in a roadside bombing in Iraq on 17 April.
The spokeswoman said Priscilla Ceballos had now admitted it was not true. The sponsor, Chicago retailer Club Libby Lu, is now reviewing the matter.
Club Libby Lu's chief executive Mary Drolet said the company was considering taking away the girl's tickets.
'Sold-out'
"We regret that the original intent of the contest, which was to make a little girl's holiday extra special, has not been realised in the way we anticipated," said Ms Drolet.
The AP news agency quoted Ms Ceballos in an interview with Dallas TV station KDFW.
"We did the essay and that's what we did to win... we did whatever we could to win," she is quoted as saying.
The top prize included a blonde Hannah Montana wig, airfare for four people to fly to Albany, New York and four tickets to the sold-out concert on 9 January.
The girl was told of her win at a shopping mall near Dallas, Texas, on Friday.
Ms Ceballos had identified the soldier as Sgt Jonathon Menjivar but the US Department of Defense has no record of anyone with that name dying in Iraq.
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