Dear IRR News subscriber,

This week we evaluate the different approaches of two official reports into state interventions after media witch hunts. In ‘Hatred, hysteria and a Trojan Horse‘, Robin Richardson is critical of a report by ex-counter terror chief Peter Clarke into the ‘Trojan Horse takeover’, in schools in Birmingham, for its failure to consider the media hysteria that bolstered the story, and its manipulation of Muslim sources to corroborate a neoconservative view of Islam. And in ‘A global witch hunt! Media narratives, racial profiling and the Roma‘, Ryan Erfani-Ghettani argues that a recent report by Ireland’s Ombudsman for Children is an indictment of heavy-handed police inquiries into the ethnicity of Roma children based on ‘explicitly prejudiced’ tip-offs from the public.

We also report on a new petition launched by the family of Ricky Reel who found out last week that their family was spied upon, along with a number of others, as they campaigned for justice in the ‘90s.

In news from across the UK, the Crown Prosecution Service announced its decision that a police officer known only as ‘E7’ has been charged with the murder of Azelle Rodney who died after being shot six times in a police operation in April 2005. And an investigation has been launched after a stowaway was run over and killed in Norfolk by a coach that he had hidden under in Calais.

Harmit Athwal

Editor, IRR News