- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Pramod Thomas
A Muslim engineer at a supply plant for nuclear reactors near Preston, Lancashire has been awarded £3,500 after workmates alleged that he holds ‘extremist Islamic views’
Mo Master, an employee at US firm Springfields Fuels, was questioned by the police after colleagues reported that he had said British troops ‘deserved to die’, reported The Times.
Workers at the site were concerned that Master had ‘become more religious’ and ‘vocal about Allah’. They were alarmed because there was access to material that could be used to make a bomb, the report added.
When bosses alerted the authorities that their employee might be a security risk Master, who had worked there for 28 years, brought a claim for religious discrimination.
Master had won damages after the tribunal agreed that he had been the victim of a ‘kneejerk’ reaction.
The hearing in Manchester was told that in 2018 Master’s manager, Tim Berry, reported him as a potential security risk after staff claimed that he had become more extreme in his views, The Times report said.
Berry told the tribunal: “Mo had changed. They (other colleagues) said that recently he had become a lot more outspoken, that he would say British troops in the Middle East deserved to die.
“He would be quite vocal about Allah whereas before Allah was rarely mentioned, and he was prepared to voice opinions whereas before he would be quite quiet about things.”
The plant’s head of security, Simon Johnson, told the tribunal that there was material at the site which could be ‘stolen to manufacture a dirty bomb’.
Johnson filed a report to the the Office for Nuclear Regulation, which contacted Prevent, the governmnt’s anti- terrorism agency.
Following this, Master took voluntary redundancy in 2018, receiving £70,000. Three months later police and Prevent investigators went to his home and the situation was revealed to his family. He was questioned and no action was taken.
According to the newspaper report, Judge Mark Leach found that Johnson had reported his concerns to the regulator ‘not as an unsubstantiated rumour but as a fact’.
He found that Master never made a comment about British troops and that being reported amounted to religious discrimination.
Despite the compensation payment, Master was also ordered to pay his former employers £7,622 in costs after making a series of other claims that were dismissed by the tribunal, The Times report said.
