A senior Channel 4 television executive and his wife have been expelled from Sri Lanka after a row over a controversial documentary screened by the station.
Stuart Cosgrove and Shirani Sabaratnam, his Sri Lankan-born wife, were “blacklisted” by the country after the airing of a Channel 4 film that accused Sri Lankan forces of committing war crimes.
The couple, who were last night in Dubai en route back to Scotland, blamed their expulsion on a misunderstanding. “We are already in discussions with the Sri Lankan Government about when we can return to a place where we have family and friends,” Mr Cosgrove said.
Sri Lankan officials confirmed that Mr Cosgrove and his wife, who is of Tamil origin, were on a list of people not wanted in Sri Lanka.
Asked why they had been blacklisted, a Sri Lankan immigration official told The Times: “Because they are from Channel 4, which without reason has harmed Sri Lanka’s reputation.”
Advertisement
Sri Lankan sources also accused Ms Sabaratnam of being a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant separatist organisation — a claim strongly denied by the couple.
The Sri Lankan Government is furious with Channel 4 for broadcasting two documentaries that featured mobile phone footage to support its claim that Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated army used extreme violence against Tamil civilians and prisoners of war in 2009.
Channel 4 yesterday defended its journalism and issued a statement pointing out that Mr Cosgrove, the station’s head of diversity, had no editorial role in the programme, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished.
A spokeswoman also made it clear that Ms Sabaratnam had never been directly employed by the channel, as the Sri Lankan officials had claimed, but worked for the digital lifestyle channel, UKTV.
It’s understood Ms Sabaratnam is working as a producer on a cookery series for the channel. Friends of the couple claimed that they had been targeted for expulsion by the Government amid heightened tensions over the visit to London of President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka. “The accusations against them are ridiculous,” one said. “They were not involved in the documentary and Shirani has never been a member of LTTE but the authorities are angry about the protests taking place in London and have used their arrival in Sri Lanka to make a stand.”
Advertisement
More than 500 Tamil protesters, many motivated by the claims made in the Channel 4 documentary, jeered Mr Rajapaksa when he arrived at a Jubilee lunch for Commonwealth leaders in London yesterday.
Mr Cosgrove, who divides his time between Glasgow and London, is best known in Scotland as a presenter of BBC Radio Scotland’s Off the Ball series.
He has written and spoken extensively of his love of his wife’s native Sri Lanka, where the couple often travel for holidays.
The couple were only recently granted visitor visas to enter Sri Lanka. Mr Cosgrove was initially allowed into the country when the couple arrived on Tuesday and made his way to their beach apartment.
However, his wife remained at the airport to answer immigration questions, after which she was refused entry.
Advertisement
Officials then turned up at Mr Cosgrove’s apartment and told him to leave the country.
A friend of the couple said: “It was a frightening couple of hours for them. However, they were not threatened or harmed in any way and they just want the situation resolved.”