Police forced to give Ali Dizaei his job backCome back Andy Hayman, all is forgiven.
Justin Davenport,
30 Sep 2011Ali Dizaei, the Scotland Yard chief jailed for corruption, has been sensationally reinstated today as a Met commander.
The officer won his job back four months after his convictions for misconduct were quashed by the Appeal Court.
Mr Dizaei, 49, who spent a year in prison, was allowed to return by a secret meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority's professional standards sub-committee.
He said: "I am delighted and really happy to be back in the police service. I intend to clear my name and I will do that irrespective of how long it takes."
However, it is understood MPA officials today took the decision to suspend him as a police officer pending his retrial on corruption allegations.
Technically he has been reinstated as a £90,000-a-year Met commander on full pay and conditions. He said he would appeal to the High Court against any decision to suspend him.
Mr Dizaei claimed the MPA committee took the reinstatement decision after a police appeals tribunal headed by a QC "unanimously" dismissed his sacking. Neither the MPA nor the Met made any initial comment today.
But the decision sent shockwaves through Scotland Yard, with insiders describing the decision as "unbelievable".
Mr Dizaei's lawyers are expected to challenge his suspension in the courts, arguing that other senior white police staff have been allowed to stay in their posts while investigations into misconduct take place.
Mr Dizaei will be formally reinstated when his police warrant card is re-
turned. It is understood that other members of the MPA were unaware of the move this morning.The decision was taken last night by six members of the sub-committee, who held a session behind closed doors to discuss the case.
One insider said officials were left with no legal alternative but to overturn the decision to dismiss the officer after the appeal court quashed his conviction.
Mr Dizaei last year became the most senior officer in 33 years to be jailed for corruption.
He was convicted in February last year after a jury at Southwark crown court found him guilty of perverting the course of justice and misconduct in a public office.
The policeman was found to have arranged the false arrest of Waad al-Baghdadi, a web designer who had done some work with him.
Iranian-born Mr Dizaei, who wore his uniform at the time, was accused of arresting Mr al-Baghdadi outside the Persian Yas restaurant in Kensington, despite knowing he did not have reasonable grounds to do so.
He was also alleged to have perverted the course of justice by falsely claiming in written statements that he was a victim of an unprovoked assault by the man.
Mr Dizaei, previously a high-flying officer tipped as a possible Met Commissioner, was dismissed from the force in March last year.
In May this year he won an appeal against conviction.
The appeal court ruled that he should face a retrial and the case is expected to be heard early next year.
The officer, a former president of the National Black Police Association, pleaded not guilty to the charges at a court hearing in June. LES
The Wonderful World of Tony Blair
Since resigning in June 2007 Tony Blair has financially enriched himself more than any ex-Prime Minister ever. Reporter Peter Oborne reveals some of the sources of his new-found wealth, much of which comes from the Middle East.
On the day Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister, he was appointed the official representative Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East. By January 2009 he had set up Tony Blair Associates - his international consultancy - which handles multi-million pound contracts in the Middle East.
It is so secretive we don't know all the locations they do business in. Dispatches shows that at the same time as Blair is visiting Middle East leaders in his Quartet role he is receiving vast sums from some of them. If Blair represented the UK government, the EU, the IMF, the UN or the World Bank, this would not be permitted. watch
The moment Britain became an island
Ancient Britain was a peninsula until a tsunami flooded its land-links to Europe some 8,000 years ago. Did that wave help shape the national character?
The coastline and landscape of what would become modern Britain began to emerge at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.
What had been a cold, dry tundra on the north-western edge of Europe grew warmer and wetter as the ice caps melted. The Irish Sea, North Sea and the Channel were all dry land, albeit land slowly being submerged as sea levels rose.
But it wasn't until 6,100BC that Britain broke free of mainland Europe for good, during the Mesolithic period - the Middle Stone Age.
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It is thought a landslide in Norway triggered one of the biggest tsunamis ever recorded on Earth, when a landlocked sea in the Norwegian trench burst its banks.
The water struck the north-east of Britain with such force it travelled 40km inland, turning low-lying plains into what is now the North Sea, and marshlands to the south into the Channel. Britain became an island nation.
At the time it was home to a fragile and scattered population of about 5,000 hunter-gatherers, descended from the early humans who had followed migrating herds of mammoth and reindeer onto the jagged peninsula.
"The waves would have been maybe as much as 10m high," says geologist David Smith. "Anyone standing out on the mud flats at that time would have been dismembered. The speed [of the water] was just so great."
Relics of these pre-island times are being recovered from under the sea off the Isle of Wight, dating from when the Solent was dry land.
Grooved timbers preserved by the saltwater are thought to be the remains of 8,000-year-old log boats, and point to the site once being a sizable boat-building yard, says Garry Momber, of the Hampshire and Wight Trust for Maritime Archaeology (see video clip below).
The tsunami was a watershed in our history, says archaeologist Neil Oliver, presenter of BBC Two's A History of Ancient Britain.
"The people living in the land that would become Britain had become different. They'd been made different. And at the same time, they'd been made a wee bit special as well." More, pics and a clip.
