Crown Prosecutor sues for race and sex prejudice over 11 September comment

A senior Crown Prosecutor is suing for race discrimination after being wrongly accused of starting a courtroom race riot by making insensitive comments about the 11 September attacks on America.

Halima Aziz, 43, was suspended after officials from Bradford magistrates' court complained she had described the terrorist attacks as being "all the fault of the Jews".

The complaint also alleged that her comments to court staff in the afternoon of 11 September "sparked off a disturbance between white and Asian youths". Ms Aziz was immediately suspended by the Crown Prosecution Service.

In a memo, one of her managers justified the suspension by saying that the alleged comments "need to be seen in the wider context of recent riots in Bradford ... where there are known pre-existing tensions between ethnic groups".

He also referred to the "massive" media outcry to a government department e-mail that said 11 September was a good day to bury news. "It is of crucial importance that consideration be given to how the media would react to allegations of this kind, and above all to the way the service responded to them," the CPS memo says.

But in April, an internal investigation into Ms Aziz's conduct failed to support allegations that her comments were "discriminatory" or that they had caused a race riot. The investigator concluded that "no such disturbance took place".

Ms Aziz alleges that her treatment breaches her right to freedom of expression as well as amounting to race and sex discrimination. She claims that the CPS victimised her by overreacting to allegations without first investigating their truth and that the response would have been different if a white person had blamed a similar attack on "the Arabs".

Ms Aziz, who is being supported by the National Black Crown Prosecution Association, is expected to tell the Leeds employment tribunal in February: "I do not believe they would have suspended a male Asian or a white person of either sex. I believe they would have dealt with the complaint informally and given hypothetical comparators [a male Asian or a white person] a chance to put their version of the events."

She is expected to add: "I was a very trusting, sociable, talkative person and did my best to cheer people up and work towards a happy working environment but after this investigation I did not feel like the same person."

Ms Aziz denies stating that 11 September was "all the fault of the Jews" but acknowledges she might have said the Arabs' dislike of America stemmed from its support of Israel.

The CPS has lifted the suspension but Ms Aziz has been suffering from stress and is now on sick leave.

In July last year an independent investigation found the CPS to be guilty of institutional racism and a few weeks later its head, Sir David Calvert-Smith QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, stated during a radio interview that he believed everyone in Britain was racist.