German gangsta rapper 'faked shooting to boost street cred'

German hip-hop's attempts to give its image a dose of street credibility have suffered an embarrassing setback after police raised suspicions that an American-style shooting of a Berlin gangsta rapper was simply a publicity stunt to promote his records.

Massiv, a 25-year-old German whose parents are Palestinian refugees from Lebanon, is one of the handful of stars on the German language rap music scene. Shaven-headed, tattooed all over and weighing more than 16 stone, his lyrics include streetwise observations such as: "Here in the ghetto no one is satisfied with €300 a month benefit after deductions."

On Monday, Massiv, whose real name is Wasiem Taha, was reported to have been shot in the shoulder by a masked man as he stood chatting on his mobile phone on a street in Berlin's run-down Neukölln district. The attacker is said to have fled in a waiting car.

A spokesman for No Limits Music, Massiv's record company, claimed shortly after the attack that the rap artist had been shot at four times and that bullets had passed clean through his right shoulder. "Massiv is totally shocked," the spokesman said. "He lost a lot of blood and was near death."

However, the record company's statement was in marked contrast to the version subsequently supplied by police investigators who said the bullet fired by the assailant had merely grazed the rap musician's upper arm. Police also said they were mystified that reports about the attack started to appear on the rapper's website while he was in an ambulance on his way to hospital. Two hours after the attack Massiv had apparently left hospital and was able to claim on his online fan forum that he had been shot through the shoulder.

"Several shots are supposed to have been fired at the singer from close range, so we are rather surprised that only one bullet grazed his arm," a police spokesman said. "However, there is no doubt that there was an incident. The victim has been wounded and we have found remains of bullets, so of course we are continuing with our investigations."

The singer angrily denied the growing allegations yesterday that the incident was a publicity stunt: "Suggestions like these are cynical, contemptible and perverse," he said. "It is completely wrong to assume that anyone could think of staging something like this."

In America, there have been several incidents in which rap singers have deliberately staged crimes in order to gain publicity in the run up to the release of a new disc. Massiv's next album, One Man One Word, is due to come out at the beginning of next month.

The shooting was the second time in less than a year that the singer has faced allegations of deliberately staging violent incidents to attract publicity. In June police were called to a Massiv concert in Duisburg in Germany's Ruhr region to break up a a brawl involving dozens of his fans.

The fighting started after two concert-goers mounted the stage and attacked the singer, who had made insulting remarks about the Ruhr shortly beforehand. There was widespread speculation that the brawl was a set-up.

Until two years ago the singer, who has convictions for drug dealing and threatening people with knives, was living in a one-room flat with his parents and sister in the provincial townof Pirmasens in the Rhineland-Palatinate. He persuaded his family to move to Berlin and began a career as a rap singer modelling himself on the American rap star 50 Cent, who boasts in his songs about being shot and wounded.