Yvonne Ridley racks up another win
TV JOURNALIST Yvonne Ridley, a former national paper reporter who converted to Islam, has won a second unfair dismissal case against a Muslim broadcasting company.
She has been awarded £20,000 by a tribunal over her constructive dismissal by the Islam Channel, a London-based cable station, last year — the award coming just six months after she won a long-running case against Al-Jazeera TV — she was sacked from the station’s English-language website, where she had been organising an NUJ chapel, in 2003. After interminable legal cases in Qatar she was awarded £13,000.
Yvonne Ridley converted to Islam after being held captive by the Taliban while covering the Anglo-US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 for the Sunday Express.
She is now working for Press TV, an Iranian government-owned English language 24-hour satellite station — and was in November back again reporting for them in Afghanistan.
At one point a car she was travelling in came under fire from the Taliban and she and her crew dived out for safety. Later, she said, the Taliban apologised to her, saying they had not known she was in the car.