The clubbers who went out in Ayia Napa and woke up in Syria were joking all along

Yesterday, just tens of miles from the stronghold of the globe’s most social media-savvy death cult, three British boys posted a picture on Facebook, claiming they’d got on a boat to war-torn Syria. We can now confirm, their story is fake.

All working a season as club reps in Ayia Napa, they said they boarded a boat after the last club shut at 7:30am, but only realised something was wrong half way through the 100 mile journey and with no one else on board.

But later, one of the boys admitted: “We just made it up for fun.”

Lewis Ellis, 25, from Manchester, Alex McCormick, 19, from Essex, and James Wallman, 23, from Hertfordshire, told news sites across the world how they managed to return home 24 hours later, only after they were met by Russian military police in Tartus, who swiftly sent them home. Tartus has been largely unaffected by the civil war that started in 2011, but was the target of three suicide bombings at a bus station just a fortnight ago.

Lewis runs his own YouTube channel, with the tag line: “Guy from Manchester trying to enjoy life as much as possible before I’m forced to grow up and settle down! I want to see everything, try everything and know when I’m on that deathbed I lived!” One attention seeking video shows him swimming in a lifejacket in the middle of the Trafford Shopping Centre in Manchester.

He stopped grabbing life by the horns to talk to the Mirror Online about what had apparently happened: “The last club closed at 7:30am so we just powered through to our 9am boat trip and ended up blagging our way onto the wrong boat. We were wearing boardshorts, hungover, looking like we were ready for a boat party.

“Everyone was foreign and it was pretty much half way out from the island when we asked ‘how come we’re so far away from land?’ We got pretty far out and at that point we were looking at each other thinking ‘what the fuck do we do now?’

“We were panicking and saying to these guys ‘you need to turn around’. After hours and hours we turned up in this place and we were like ‘what the fuck, where are we?'”

He also added: “It’s the most ridiculous fucking story ever. We went to watch dolphins and ended up in fucking Syria.”

Lewis then claimed they were driven to a Russian military base, but they only figured out their location when they tried to post on Facebook.

Alex said: “Eventually we found a translator and when we told him he just fell about laughing. We hung round in their quarters and they took pictures of us before we could get the boat back.”

Alex said the trio are now the laughing stock of the resort, and his mum is less than pleased. Still, he admits: “It’s one to tell the kids one day.”

But when Lewis shared an article from the Mirror, the comments revealed it was a prank.