A late controversy is brewing over who actually took the 'Napalm Girl photo,' which brought the horrors of the Vietnam War to the world's attention.

The photo was taken on June 8, 1972. It captures a moment when a napalm bomb fell on a village in the South Trang Bang area, where fierce clashes were taking place between North Vietnamese forces and the South Vietnamese army, showing a girl running out of the village in terror, throwing off her clothes.

The subject of the 'Napalm Girl' photograph and the known original photographer Nick Ut. /Courtesy of AP Yonhap News

According to reports from sources including the U.K.'s The Guardian on the 18th (local time), the World Press Photo Foundation, which named this photo 'Photo of the Year' in 1973, recently decided to stop identifying the original photographer.

On its website, WPP introduced the photo along with its official title, 'The Terror of War,' but marked the photographer information only as 'Original Author Controversy (AP).'

The person who captured the terror of war in the photo and conveyed it to the world was Nick Ut, a photographer affiliated with the Associated Press in Vietnam's Saigon (currently Ho Chi Minh City). Ut won both the WPP Photo of the Year Award the following year and the Pulitzer Prize for this photo.

However, a documentary screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January this year triggered the 'original author controversy.' Titled 'The Stringer,' this documentary argues that it was not Ut, the AP photographer, but rather Nguyen Thanh Nguyen, Ut's driver and a stringer for NBC, who actually took the photo.

The documentary claims that Nguyen, who drove Ut to the site in question that day, took the photo and sold it to the Associated Press for $20. The documentary asserts that the Associated Press published the photo under Ut's name rather than Nguyen's, citing that he was not affiliated with the company.

The WPP, accepting this claim, independently initiated verification and concluded that 'Nguyen Thanh Nguyen and others were in a better position to take the photograph than Nick Ut based on an analysis of location, distance, and the characteristics of the camera used at the time.'

However, the Associated Press did not accept this claim. In a 96-page report released after its own verification of the documentary's claims, the Associated Press concluded that 'there is no decisive evidence to change the identity of the photographer.' However, it noted that due to the long passage of time, key evidence is lacking, and many individuals who had knowledge of the situation have since passed away, making it difficult to reach a definitive conclusion.