Swedish broadcaster Sveriges Radio has come under criticism for not removing an interview with Islamist radical Raad Al-Duhan after it was revealed the woman who conducted the interview was friends with him.
The Swedish website Doku revealed that a reporter for the publicly-funded Sveriges Radio had been in a friendly relationship with a radical Islamist who had been deemed as a security threat by Swedish police.
While the woman resigned from her position in October, the broadcaster has come under criticism for continuing to host an interview of the Islamist conducted by her on its news service Ekot, Aftonbladet reports.
Ekot chief Klas Wolf-Watz stated that the articles were allowed to remain because they were still considered newsworthy.
Daniel Öhman, a journalist with Ekot, told Aftonbladet that he has only become aware of the relationship after Swedish media had published the story about it.
Another former employee of the programme told the newspaper: “This has now had huge consequences, both for employee safety and for Ekot’s credibility. Those who work at Ekot have built their careers on being consistently neutral and impartial, and they are the ones who are suffering now.”
“Her work has not been impartial, and I, therefore, think it is wrong for Ekot to keep the articles on the site. As long as they do, Ekot, a taxpayer-funded business, appears as his private propaganda channel,” the employee added.
According to the newspaper Expressen, Raad Al-Duhan has reportedly lived with the female journalist and currently is registered as living with the journalist’s mother.
Al-Duhan is the son of Islamist preacher Abo Raad, who Swedish police attempted to deport to Iraq in 2019 due to the Swedish security service Säpo considering him a security threat.
Imam Abo Raad remains in Sweden despite attempts to deport him and was sentenced to pay damages to a reporter from Gefle Dagblad after threatening the journalist for taking photographs of him at a school the newspaper was investigating for links to radicalism in 2019.