A BBC reporter who sent a tweet mistakenly claiming the Queen had died committed “a serious breach” of guidelines, the BBC Trust has said.
The report said Ahmen Khawaja, a BBC Urdu reporter, had not been told the corporation was running a rehearsal of how it might handle a royal death.
The BBC Trust said “some news staff” had been sent an email informing them of the royal obituary rehearsal and telling them not to discuss it on social media or elsewhere.
“A number of tweets were sent from her Twitter account. The first stated that the Queen was being treated in hospital, the second stated that the Queen had died; the tweets included a link to BBC World’s official Twitter feed.”
The Trust said the tweets were “a grave error of judgement” and it “profoundly regretted any distress that had been caused”.
It added that while the tweets had not come from an official BBC Twitter account, the links to the BBC World account – and the journalist’s position with BBC Urdu – would have caused greater confusion and disseminated the mistake more widely.
The BBC Executive agreed that they viewed the incident as “a serious breach of the Editorial Guidelines”, and said an internal inquiry into what happened was ongoing.
