The Trojan Horse Affair - Part 7

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We're going to pick up a thread we left off a bit ago, back from when Homs and I were reporting in Birmingham, and this happened.

I just got a letter from the council threatening an injunction.

Same here, buddy.

We are in trouble.

We need to figure this out very quickly.

Yeah, okay.

Homs and I had been connecting dots for some Birmingham City Council members about the relationship between the Trojan horse letter and Adderly Primary School.

The former council leader, Albert Bohr, had just responded by saying he was aghast at what we were telling him, that what we'd discovered could have changed the whole course of the Trojan horse affair.

When next we knew, Hams and I each got an angry letter from council lawyers demanding that we hand over any confidential council materials we'd gotten hold of and stop our reporting on them, and that if we didn't, they'd take us to the High Court of England and Wales and get a judge to gag us.

Within hours against this threat, Brian had fled the city.

As you know, I'm not in Birmingham right now.

I'm in an undisclosed location.

He'd hidden our report materials somewhere I didn't know.

And then it sounded like we should just both get out of the country.

Okay.

And soon, we'd both be in Belgium.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Brussels with the our final stop.

The main exit is that the Which I know it sounds overdramatic, but escaping the United Kingdom wasn't my idea.

Hams and I were warned that the way the law works in England, it was possible, maybe not hugely likely, but possible, that authorities could come knocking on our doors and try to make us hand over reporting materials.

We were worried about our sources, that they might be identified.

And there was one document in particular that the lawyers said in their letters to us the Birmingham City Council wanted back.

One document that this all really seemed to be about.

that the City Council seemed dead set on making sure Hams and I would not tell you about.

The audit report.

Remember that one?

It was passed to us via gloved hands?

The audit report contained the findings of the investigation that Birmingham City Council auditors had conducted into the resignation dispute at Adderly Primary School.

The council finalized it right before the Trojan horse letter arrived on Albert Bohr's desk, and it was the official report suggesting that Adderly headteacher Rizvana Dar had possibly forged the resignation letters of the four TAs at her school.

Because of the report, the city council had even referred the case to the police.

And of course, it was the month after the audit was completed that the Trojan horse letter appeared, suggesting the whole resignation situation and even the audit investigation itself was part of an elaborate Islamist conspiracy of which Rezvan Adar was a victim.

Well, the council was now saying to us, in essence, you fools, you should never trust that audit report.

And they reminded us in these letters of something we knew but had never fully understood.

After the Trojan horse letter blew up publicly, the council had officially retracted the audit report.

They disavowed their auditors' findings that Rasvanadar might have been behind the resignation letters and quietly they buried the document.

This document which appeared to debunk the Trojan horse letter.

Frankly, the retraction of the audit report to Brian and I It looked like a cover-up.

It's why long before the council threatened us, I had convinced Brian that we should get rid of the copy of the report that we had in the UK.

I knew it was sensitive and I could see where things might be headed, that the council might come after us for it.

So, late one night, in yet another dramatic scene, can you not shine that in my eyes?

I can't see anything.

I'm just trying to.

When we find ourselves with some time to kill near an empty field during a reporting trip in Wales, should we just do it here?

In through the bushes or something, we decided to make a ceremony of it.

I just want to say,

as I'm lighting this document on fire,

I really, really miss the First Amendment.

There it goes.

That's pretty.

In their threat letter to us, the Council's lawyers denied directly that there had been a conspiracy to hide the audit.

They said there'd been no cover-up inside the council's ranks.

Yet they offered no explanation for why they'd retracted it.

They didn't say what evidence, if any, the council had uncovered after the fact that made them reject what their auditors had found.

They said vaguely that the report was unreliable and the lawyers informed us in bullying legalese that if we considered the council's audit report as a credible document, if we relied on it to suggest that Mrs.

Darr had possibly concocted the resignation letters or authored the Trojan horse letter, we'd be making a huge mistake.

They said we'd be getting the story totally wrong.

What they specifically said was that it would be, quote, mischievous and perverse of us to treat the audit report as credible.

They said unequivocally that Mrs.

Darr did not write the resignation letters or the Trojan horse letter.

The council was implying that there was something they knew that we didn't, something that made them change their whole understanding of the Adidi case and of the Trojan horse affair.

I don't know, there's got to be some information they're acting on.

In another tunnel out.

Yeah,

there had to be some information that they got that inspired that.

What did the council know that we didn't?

From Cereal Productions and the New York Times, I'm Hosa Saeed.

I'm Brian Reed.

This is the Trojan Horse Affair.

The Council retracted the audit report in the autumn of 2014.

And it wasn't some public announcement.

The decision happened behind the ornate facade of Council House in private meetings among officials and lawyers.

But hopefully, before the council threatened us, someone had leaked Brian and me.

What else?

A letter.

We've taken to calling this one the Hay Letter because it was written by a top council officer at the time named Peter Hay.

And we're hopeful it'll provide some answers because Peter Hay wrote this letter to Adderley Primary School and in it explained over two pages why the council did it, why they nullified the the audit report.

I would like to take this opportunity to detail the reasons why the audit report is incorrect and hence retracted.

When Brian read it aloud, though, it was not what we expected.

Both myself and the council have found that the audit report is fundamentally flawed, incorrect, wholly unreliable, and one-sided.

After a thorough investigation by the council, we have come to the view that the conclusions reached in the report are completely incorrect and that the report was ill-considered, misconceived, and poorly timed.

The Hay letter is packed with so many synonyms for the the audit report being wrong that we were certain, somewhere in it, Peter Hay would walk through whatever evidence had come to light to make the council overturn the audit.

But he doesn't really.

He says a few times that the audit report was one-sided because Rasvana Dar and Adeli hadn't cooperated with the investigation.

They'd been advised not to by their lawyers while the TAs had an active legal case against the school.

Hay seems to put a lot of significance on that, as if the council was surprised to learn that Mrs.

Darr hadn't taken part in the audit.

Even though that wasn't a new discovery, the auditors talk about it at some length in the report itself.

Peter Hay also mentions that the police had changed their mind about what happened to Adelie, but again doesn't say why.

He just continues groveling in a please don't sue us kind of tone.

It is wholly accepted that Ms.

Darr was in no way involved in fabricating the alleged letters and has fully cooperated at all times with the authority.

I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for the personal distress and upset that this has caused Ms.

Darr and fully understand what a harrowing experience this has been for her.

The council and I recognized that it was a mistake to produce such an incorrect and biased document, which had little factual basis.

What?

What?

What is going on?

This reads to me like...

You know when a hostage delivers like a speech to camera saying, I'm fine, I'm okay.

This reads to me like that.

What is the city talking about?

We were no clearer after getting this letter what the council learned about Adderly that made them see things differently.

So we took the Hay letter to Peter Hay himself to ask him if he could interpret for us, tell us what evidence he and his colleagues came across that made them believe their auditors had been wrong about Rosvana Dar.

It had been more than three years since he'd written this abject letter, so Peter Hay had to give it a quick reread.

And he seemed to spot something in it that explained the turnaround.

There you go.

There you go, what?

Well, if you hold a constant mind when the evidence in front of you changes...

What's the evidence?

That's what we want to know.

Set out in here.

Is it though?

So

you've got

that

well I've set out over two sides

the failure to take into consideration things.

Mrs.

Darr's involvement, change of information from the police, the conclusions they've reached to, and the need to kind of have a re-look at it.

That was about as specific an answer as we got from Peter Hay.

No more specific than his letter.

We went round and round on this.

So there's nothing we're missing that there was nothing else that you can remember that was causing this.

Well, what do you remember about how this came about?

Like, even this letter is very,

it's very dramatic.

Like, you're really apologizing a lot.

There's a lot of

adjectives.

What prompted this letter?

Do you remember writing this?

I don't know, and it's odd because it's not fully laid out at the top as it would be laid out.

Is this one remember this?

It's got my signature on it.

Yeah, but we've got to ask, this is a story about possibly fake letters.

I'm serious.

Did you write this?

Look, it's got a signature on the bottom.

And it looks like my style.

I may have got some things wrong.

There are still some things in this whole instance that are unknown and are unclear

and may remain unknown and unclear for some time.

We said goodbye to Peter Hay, wondering if he was as bewildered as we were.

Did he honestly not remember why they disowned the audit?

Or was he getting so twisted up because he was withholding something?

The only concrete development he seemed to offer to explain why the council flipped was because the police had undergone their own change of heart on the Adderly resignation case.

A quick timeline here.

The four TAs filed grievances against Roswana Dar in 2012.

Just as the school was about to hear those grievances, the four disputed resignations appeared.

About a year later, in the autumn of 2013, council auditors finished their investigation, issued the audit report, and the council asked the cops to take on the case because it looked to the auditors as if the TAs had been victims of a fraud, which is a criminal matter.

The view was at that point

that Rizwan Dar, the school, are misbehaving in some way.

This is retired detective and present private eye Andrew Bannister.

The city council asked his department, the West Midlands Police, to look into the Adderley resignations and they did.

They reviewed the council's audit investigation and they got a warrant to go into Adderly Primary School on the last day of March 2014.

Detective Bannister says they entered the school with the following hypothesis.

That Ms.

Wanadar had orchestrated

the resignations and the subsequent stacking of the staff and that the material was there to corroborate that.

The letters, the original letters, the resignation letters at the school hadn't been handed over, hadn't been analysed, and this was all because Roswana Dar was

corrupt.

But when the police left that visit to Adderly, they believed the opposite.

They were viewing Roswana Dar as a potential victim in the fraud rather than a suspect.

The whole thing started one way and ended up.

different.

Yeah, that's what we're trying to figure out.

Right.

Right.

So we asked Andrew Bannister, what evidence did you find that caused you to change your view of Rosvana Darr, which in turn made the Birmingham City Council change its view of Rosvana Darr?

Detective Bannister wasn't at that school visit himself, but he knows the Adderly case well because he did a review of the investigation and the evidence.

And he told us, When police officers got to Adderly that last day of March, they were surprised to find that Rosvana Darr and her leadership team were eager to cooperate with them.

The cops hadn't been expecting that, given Adderley's refusal to work with with the council's auditors.

And Bannister says Mrs.

Darner colleagues had proof that the TAs did send resignation letters to the school.

My understanding is that they were able to say straight away that the letters had been delivered by hand by a third party and it was on CCTV.

The school had CCTV footage of letters being delivered by a school volunteer.

a woman named Fritzana Bebe.

Fritzana Beebe is the sister of two of the Muslim TAs.

She was also on the governing body at Adderley.

The camera footage showed that Fritzana Bebe had walked into the school reception area on the day of the supposed resignations at 1.04 p.m.

with a stack of envelopes in her hand.

The envelopes were placed in a tray at the front counter.

The admin staff saw them being there and the CCTV corroborated that.

And those envelopes were collected by Roswana

whilst going immediately into a staff meeting and that those envelopes were opened

that they were opened in the presence of the the senior leadership team of the school.

So it tends to put a completely different

slant

on the matter.

Got it.

Yes, there we go.

That answers that question.

That does put a completely different slant on the matter.

It's how I would have reacted to Andrew Bannister if this fact that there were letters was new information which the police had uncovered that day.

But it wasn't.

The TAs didn't dispute that they'd asked Farzana Bibi to drop off some letters.

They just said there were health-related forms that missed Dahr had requested while they were all on leave from work, not resignations.

This was all covered in the council's audit.

So this vaunted CCTV evidence, aside from not being new, was pretty much meaningless because it only corroborated something both sides agreed on, that envelopes had arrived at the school.

It didn't prove that there were resignations inside those envelopes.

In fact, the whole mention of CCTV footage for Bowman City Council auditors, it only made them more suspicious of Mrs.

Darr.

Because soon after envelopes arrived, when she called the HR department at Bowman City Council to tell them that some TAs had just resigned, she mentioned unprompted that the school had CCTV footage of a relative of the employees dropping off the envelopes.

The auditor notes the oddity of this detail since why would you proactively reference CCTV evidence before any conflict had arisen?

It was as if Mrs.

Dahr was anticipating that the TAs would challenge the resignations.

So yeah, as we told Andrew Bannister.

Fertana BB

being caught on CCTV delivering letters.

That wasn't new information that the police came across when they visited the school.

That was in the auditor report.

They had that information, so what new at the school?

I don't think they had got it in the auditor report.

We spent a a couple hours parsing this with Bannister.

What had the police uncovered that was new?

What facts changed their understanding of this situation and of Rosvana Dar?

He talked about the alleged resignation letter of the white non-Muslim teaching assistant, Hillary Owens, which turned up on a separate day from the others and in separate circumstances that would not sound out of place in a game of clue.

She was the last person in the cloakroom prior to the letter being discovered in the pigeonhole.

But that didn't get us anywhere either.

We could not understand what made the police switch to seeing Rizwana Dar as a victim instead of a potential culprit.

I spoke to Rizwana Dar.

You spoke to her personally?

Yeah, I have spoken to her.

I found her to be

open, forthcoming,

and

credible.

So what was she telling you?

Basically, that she was trying to push the school in one way.

The staff were reticent, and that that has subsequently come to these resignation letters.

This was all motivated to get her out of the school.

We were interested in knowing whether she told you something else that wasn't in the audit.

No, I think what she was able to do is probably put a greater

explanation on it and put it,

you know,

put it into, contextualize it.

Detective Bannister kept saying the difference was this, that even if the auditors had the same information, they hadn't talked to anyone at the school, whereas the police had.

But what did they learn in doing that that was different?

What evidence came from that or what testimony came from doing that that changed the position completely?

My honest answer to that is it's not evidence, it's interpretation.

Okay, so we're so that we're understanding that correctly.

It's not something we're missing here.

If what Andrew Bannister was saying was right, and all that had changed between the council auditor's conclusion that Rosvanadar was possibly the perpetrator of a fraud and the cops' conclusion that she was the victim of a fraud was a matter of interpretation and not any additional facts.

Then it made us wonder if the only new piece of evidence, and I'm using that term loosely, the only new evidence that the cops had, which the auditors did not, was the Trojan horse letter.

The Trojan horse letter had turned up in this window after the council issued its audit report, but before the police headed into into Adderley.

And it certainly brought new context to the situation at the school.

It certainly offered an intriguing new interpretation of what might have been happening there.

Except, Detective Bannister had already made a point of telling us right when we sat down with him that this case was not about the Trojan horse letter.

In the first few minutes of our interview, he'd emphasized that at no stage were the West Midlands police investigating that document.

Absolutely not.

It wasn't an investigation to the Trojan horse letter.

Which makes sense, because we know the police determined early on that the letter was bogus, and the plot it described wasn't real.

But here's where things get weird.

Hams and I had found police records, which showed that the Trojan horse letter was a part of their investigation into Adderly.

We got this one report that was written by Detective Bannister, and he says in it that one reason the police decided Rasvanadar should now be treated as a potential victim in the case was because detectives had considered, quote, the information outlined in a section of the Trojan horse letter.

We showed that report to Bannister.

So the Trojan horse letter was taken into account, was used as evidence, basically.

You're saying that the Trojan horse letter was used as evidence in refocusing the investigation and treating Dar as a victim?

That's what this seems to be saying to me.

Yeah,

you would have to, because

whether it was.

He had a hard time explaining this one.

Whether the fact that the letters are

fake, whether the Trojan horse letter,

whoever wrote the Trojan Horse letter,

the facts within the Trojan Horse letter, there are some that you would look at it and go, well, that exactly mirrors

what is taking place.

Was I cognizant that these circumstances fit with the letter?

Yeah.

But enough that.

I don't have to be a moron.

Not to.

But even more specifically,

you treated what the letter's saying about Adderly as

relatively legitimate because you're pointing to it as a reason why Rasvana Dar should not be treated as a victim.

So you're basically buying what this letter that you think could be fake

is saying about

Adderly.

Yeah.

Within days of visiting Adderley and talk to Rasvana Darr, the police's theory of the resignation case inverted so completely that they secured a new round of warrants.

This time, they went after the 40s.

They conducted dawn raids at their homes and confiscated the women's computers and electronics.

They arrested them all for conspiracy to commit fraud and took them down to the station for interviews.

This is a recording of the police interrogating Hilary Owens, the white so-called English woman, as she's referred to in the Trojan Horse Ladder.

We got this recording only after we spoke to Detective Bannister.

And if there was any doubt that the Trojan Horse Ladder guided the police, this puts the matter to bed.

When Brian and I first listened to it, we were kind of riveted.

The cop pulls out a copy of the Trojan Horse Letter and starts questioning Hilary Owens about it.

This is a letter you may or may not be aware of.

The Trojan Horse.

You said it.

I was going to ask if you were aware, but clearly you are.

I imagine you've read lots about it in the press and what have you.

I'm not going to go through all of this because it is quite lengthy.

Have you had a chance to read all of it?

Yeah.

Okay.

Is there anything in it that jumps out at you?

Well, only the thing about the English woman.

Right.

Which has clearly been put in about me.

You think that's about you?

Who else could it be?

So the bit that you're referring to is, and I'll read this over the tape.

Has the white English woman dropped.

The cop reads the Addedly part of the Georgian horse letter to Hilary Owens.

First, a bit about the English woman's role in the plot, how she dropped off her own fake resignation letter, and how, if the whole scheme goes south and the TAs get found out, the Englishwoman will take the heat for the Islamists.

When you read that, what did you think?

I was horrified.

That's not me.

Okay.

And it suggests that it is.

Hilary Owens has to fend off questions from the cop about whether she's an Islamist plotter.

Was there any sort of campaign to remove Mrs.

Darr from the school?

Never.

No.

Never.

Okay, had anyone ever spoken to you about changing the staff within the school?

It's nothing to do with us.

We're TAs.

We've got no power whatsoever.

Had anyone ever floated the idea, not necessarily asked for help, but said, this is what I'm going to do?

No.

Never.

This is why it's so ridiculous.

It goes on to say that Mrs.

Ferzana.

Bibi.

Yep.

Farzana Bibi, the sister of two of the teaching assistants who was captured on CCTV delivering envelopes to Adelaide and was a governor at the school.

She's also mentioned in the Trojan Horse La as an operative in the plot against Mrs.

Dar.

The cop keeps reading the letter.

Sister Farzana has also been key to keeping us informed as to what the governing body and the head are discussing, etc.

And as a result, result, we have been able to execute this perfectly.

We will soon be moved into another school as a governor and over time we will instigate the same process there.

What process was going on at the school?

I have no idea.

No?

No.

I have no clue.

Were you aware of any

underlying currents within the school?

No, not at all.

This is completely out of the loop, this this resignation letter of mine.

Ha ha.

Okay.

Can you think of any reason why someone would put in a resignation letter on your behalf?

I have no clue.

If I knew that, I would tell you.

I have no idea why somebody would do something that evil.

Okay.

Has anyone said I'm going to do this as a joke?

No.

A joke?

That's not a very funny joke.

To resign me from the only job I've got to

put me through

financial hardship.

It's not a joke.

No, I appreciate that.

I'm sorry, but this is just too much.

And to think that I would do it myself, just to unseat the head, it's ludicrous.

Did anyone want you out of the school?

The only person I can imagine is the person who has two grievances against her.

But I have no proof that it was she who did it.

But you believe that it's Mrs.

Darr?

I don't know.

I honestly can't say that.

I don't know.

Is that what you think?

That's the only thing I can imagine is the fact that I've got two unresolved grievances against Mrs.

Darr,

and then suddenly I resign.

Why would I do that?

Why would I go to the bother of writing two

grievances and then resign?

And that's why we're here today.

We're trying to find out what's happened.

I'm not yet arrested.

It's ridiculous.

Sorry.

No, no, no.

It's okay.

You take your time.

It's fine.

It's just

too much.

I imagine it's a lot of pressure.

Yes.

And there's all this rubbish going on in the paper saying these awful people, this Islamic plot, this jihad, it's nonsense.

I was just a TA doing my job.

The arrests came to nothing.

According to Detective Bannister, the police found no trace of the resignation letters, or the Trojan horse letter for that matter, on any of the TAs or Frozana BB's electronics.

They found no conclusive evidence at all, nothing that proved the TA's guilt.

Long after the arrests, the cops would eventually drop the case.

But in the meantime, the police having changed their take on the Adeli dispute and arresting the TAs, that caused the Birmingham City Council to question its audit report.

As Peter Hay confirmed to us, he and his colleagues at the council started doubting their assessment that Mrs.

Darr was maybe a fraudster.

On top of all of that, Adelie Primary School was now formally threatening to sue the council over the way it had handled the resignation case.

We learnt about this by holding a light behind a poorly redacted council document.

In response to the threat, Peter Hay and his council colleagues started meeting with Mrs.

Darr and other Adeli leaders, and after months of back and forth, they ultimately promised to renounce their audit report, and Adelie promised to drop its legal threat against them.

Peter Hay composed his we're so sorry retraction letter and the council, as part of this whole agreement, restored legal support to Adelaide, defending Raswana Darr school in the employment case brought by the 40s.

I don't know if any COP or council official paused to consider what was happening, that they were letting a fake letter influence their decisions.

But evidently Mrs.

Darr was quite convincing once she had the Trojan horse at her disposal.

In early 2014, she wrote to her union, the NAHT, the National Association of Head Teachers, complaining that they hadn't been supportive of her in the resignation dispute and placing them, quote, on notice of Operation Trojan Horse.

She wrote, it is clear to me that I've been the target of a prolonged, organized, and systematic attack designed to discredit me and make my position as head of Adelaide untenable.

A union rep quickly set a meeting with her and offered to help her out.

And then there was the Employment Tribunal, where the TAs had brought their unfair dismissal case against Adelaide School.

Once the Trojan Horse Letter emerged, Mrs.

Darr drafted a witness statement for the tribunal that focused entirely on the letter, in which she went through the Trojan horse plot step by step to explain how she'd been one of its targets.

The TAs, in turn, tried to enter the council's audit report as evidence to support their claim that Mrs.

Darr was the one plotting to oust them.

But the council's lawyers fought the TA's petition.

and they were successful.

The judge in the tribunal case, while he knew an audit report existed, never got to see it.

But the Trojan Hosarah, the judge definitely saw that.

The council submitted the letter as a primary piece of evidence in their defense of Adelaide.

And that defense was that Rizvan Adar had been the victim of an Islamic plot carried out by the four teaching assistants as described in the letter.

The council argued in front of the judge that the Trojan Hosarah was true, literally true.

It worked.

In a final extravagant act, one with big consequences for everybody involved, lawyers defending Mrs.

Darr in the school used the Trojan horse ladder to sway the judge in their favour.

The judge, Rohan Pirani, and his fellow panel members ruled that the three Muslim TAs were involved in deception to remove Mrs.

Darr from the school, that they'd each intended to make her believe they'd quit by arranging to have resignation letters submitted with their forged signatures signatures on them and then pretending to know nothing about it.

In other words, Judge Pirani adopted the Trojan horse version of events at Adelaide.

Well, mostly.

When it came to the quote-unquote English face, Hilary Owens, the judge and panel ruled that she had been wrongly dismissed from her job, she hadn't been part of a deception, and ordered the school to pay her damages.

Here's how that racially spit decision came to be.

The council on Rizvana Dar did not present any direct evidence that the TAs had concocted the resignations, but the Council's lawyers used the Trojan horse letter to undermine the Muslim TA's credibility.

They turned the case from a straightforward and fair dismissal claim into a fight about religion, specifically Salafism, the ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam.

Just to explain how Salafism became relevant to this case.

Remember, the Trojan horse letter purported to be plans for a Salafi plot.

It was explicit about that distinction.

From reading the case files, along with comprehensive notes taken by one of the TA's lawyers, there's no transcript, and talking to people who were there, we know that is what the case turned on, whether the TAs were Salafi.

Council lawyers pressed the teaching assistants on this in the hearing, were they Salafis?

Hilary Owens offered the tribunal a statement from her Reverend, T.W.

Pilkinton, vouching for her regular attendance at church.

But it didn't go so easy for the Muslim TAs.

In one of the most pivotal exchanges of the hearing, one of the TAs, Rohin Khanoum, was asked to explain the difference between a Salafi and a Sunni Muslim.

And she said she didn't know.

Daniel Zakis, a solicitor who represented Hillary Owens, was there when it happened.

He told us that in response, Burmese City Council's lawyers started questioning her about, well, hang on, where does your husband work?

And what was the answer to that?

Salafi school

doesn't help, yeah.

The other two Muslim TAs gave similarly evasive answers on the stand.

Zaka said his sense was that the women kind of panicked, probably figured if they acknowledged any link to Salafi Islam, they were going to lose.

Not only was Salafism a third rail in this case, it's kind of become a third rail generally, because some terrorists have come from a Salafi background.

Also, that question, what's the difference between a Salafi and a Sunni?

It's a tricky one to answer, because Salafis are Sunnis.

They're just more originalist in their interpretation.

For what it's worth, Zaka said he found everything else the TAs said throughout the case, about about what happened, about not resigning, consistent and credible.

But that one Salafi thing...

How damaging was that answerable?

Yeah, I think that destroyed the credibility.

Could you feel it in that room?

Could you feel it?

Yeah,

I think it was.

I think there was a...

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can tell from the judge's reaction.

It just sort of hung there.

As Judge Pirani wrote in his decision, we find the first three claimants wholly incredible on this issue.

So that's how it happened.

Because of the Salafism stumble and a few other reasons, including the fact that the TA's sister Farzana Bibi did not testify, the judge and the panel found that the Muslim TAs had schemed against the head teacher.

Hilary Owens, on the other hand, they found that her resignation letter had also been forged, just not by her.

As for who was responsible for that forgery, the judge never explained.

It just feels increasingly likely that it's the Trojan horse letter.

In which case, if it is, you've just...

This whole situation was so exasperating, it was hard to finish our sentences.

The Birmingham City Council, these are the same people who talk about the Trojan horse letter this way.

It's probably a hoax.

It's probably a fake.

I'm not claiming the letter is true.

There's never been a plot.

The way it was presented, some of the inaccuracies in it and just the sheer convenience of it leads me to believe that it was a fake

yet their own lawyers argued in front of a judge successfully that the letter was proof of a real plot they embraced a fake letter while rejecting their own fact-based audit report

Hamza and I had started with what we thought was such a basic question.

What evidence did they have that we didn't?

And now, we felt as if we'd wandered fully through the looking glass into a land where Mrs.

Dar had somehow gotten the Trojan horse letter to be treated as real and not the double speakey it's fake but could still be pointing at actual issues real.

Really real.

There's no other evidence here.

Oh, we can we can say that as a fact, as a fact.

No other evidence here.

Nothing new came to light.

After the break, we eat our words.

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One day, Brian and I were on the phone.

We're going through the audit report together for the umpteenth time.

And you notice something that we'd never clocked before.

In the audit.

When you read the auditor's summary, she mentions nothing about the school claiming that there there were witnesses who saw Mrs.

Darr open the envelopes and resignation letters come out.

That is not in the audit report.

Here's what Brian was talking about.

Remember the sequence of events Detective Andrew Bannister laid out for us.

The sister of the TAs, Frasana Beebe, was recorded on CCTV walking into Aderley with a stack of envelopes.

She handed them to the receptionist who placed them in Roswana Darr's meal tray.

And then, as Detective Bannister told us, those envelopes were collected by

Roswana

whilst going immediately into a staff meeting and that those envelopes were opened,

that were opened in the presence of the senior leadership team of the school.

Detective Bannister had said that Mrs.

Darr opened those envelopes in front of the school's leadership team, specifically two deputy headteachers named Mark Walters and Anila Ashroff.

Mark Walters and Anila Ashroff told police they had been in the office with Mrs.

Darr when she opened the envelopes left by Farzana Bibi and had personally seen Mrs.

Darr pull resignation letters from inside them.

This detail was also an important element of Adley's defense at the Employment Tribunal because, of course, two eyewitnesses.

Without them, the school could only prove that envelopes had been delivered, which again the Muslim TAs didn't dispute.

It was only by having eyewitnesses that the school could back up Mrs.

Darr's account that when she opened the sealed envelopes, she'd found resignations.

Mark and Neale's presence at the envelope opening was foundational to the case, unquestioned by either side.

The judge took it as a given, and so had we, until this very moment, when Brian realized it was not mentioned in the audit report.

Which means that either the auditor left it out egregiously or it wasn't in the document she was reviewing, where the school was laying out its defense.

Adelie had laid out its version of what happened the day the letters came in in a legal filing with the Employment Tribunal, the school's formal defense.

It submitted this early on, long before the Trojan horse led before the police investigated.

So Brian dug up that record.

And the deputies witnessing the envelope opening, it wasn't in there either.

There is no mention in the school's defense that there were witnesses inside the room when resignation letters came out of the envelopes.

Well, that was something.

The school had made sure to mention the pointless CCTV footage, but no witnesses to the envelope opening.

Why?

Why would that not be part of their official defense that they're submitting to the tribunal?

Why would they leave that out?

I kept flipping through our binders of paperwork through the earliest records we have from back when the resignation letters were first refuted in late 2012 and early 2013.

And I saw nothing about the deputy headteachers having watched Mrs.

Darr open the envelopes.

Then, Hams and I looked back one more time at records from the police investigation into Adderly, which happened much later.

We reread that report that was written by Detective Andrew Bannister, in which he talks about what the the cops learned on their visit to Adderley.

And there it was.

The senior leadership team had witnessed the envelopes being opened.

He lists that as like a new fact.

Yeah, so that was been confusing us because we're like, why is that new information?

Why is that new information?

But maybe it was new information.

Maybe it was like, you know, one of the first times the school was saying this.

We called Detective Bannister.

The visit to the school, was that the first time that the police learned that the deputies had been in the room when Mrs.

Darr opened the envelopes?

I can't state categorically that I believe that's the case.

Because that would explain why you guys would change your view.

Which is what I was trying to say before.

We had not gotten the message.

We also called Hillary Owens' solicitor in the tribunal case, Daniel Zackis.

When did this become their defense?

The fact that there were

people in the room.

It was never in their first defense that they filed.

They just referred to the CCTV.

Daniel Zack has told us, and this is corroborated by records from the Employment Tribunal, that the first time Adderley mentioned that the deputies had been in the room with Mrs.

Darr as she opened the envelopes and pulled out resignations was in November 2013, which means the deputies, Respondent Darr, the school, no one to our knowledge, told outside authorities about this for nearly a year.

Not when Birmingham City Council cut off legal support to Adderly, not when the council mounted an audit investigation and asked repeatedly for Adderley to provide evidence and testimony.

Not when the school had to file a formal defense when the TAs were taking Adderly to the tribunal.

Through all that, they never mentioned these crucial eyewitnesses.

Did that strike you guys?

And if so, what

it did?

It did.

Yeah.

So, why withhold that for so long?

Well, it's, yeah.

That's a good question.

November 2013.

That immediately struck Brian and me as an interesting time for these two eyewitnesses to have emerged because that's the same month that the Trojan horse that I emerged.

November 2013 is when the Trojan horse that arrived at Burma City Council.

And that wasn't the only evidence to suddenly appear bolstering Adelaide's case.

A few months later, Adeli's lawyers wrote a letter to the parties in the Employment Tribunal, saying that there was another document they wanted to introduce in the hearing.

At this point, lawyers for the school had already submitted loads of evidence and records, but they were determined to get in this late submission.

It was, they said, an investigative report that the deputies Mark Walters and Anina Ashraf had put together in the days right after the supposed resignations, and in it, the deputies note that the two of them saw misses Darr opening the envelopes.

This investigative report, by the way, consists primarily of Mark Walters and Anita Ashraff fact-checking each other by asking each other what each other saw.

It's the only record we've seen that purports to be contemporaneous evidence from December 2012 of Mark Walters and Anita Ashraff witnessing the envelope opening.

Yet as Adeli's lawyers explained to the tribunal, for some unknown reason, the school had forgotten to enter this document alongside the reams of submissions that already filed.

The judge allowed it and by the time he's hearing the case, these witnesses seemed like an early established fact, one that the judge relied on in making his decision.

Can we apologize for something?

After we pieced together this timeline, we met up again with former counsel officer Peter Hay, author of the Hay Letter, in which he wrote about how royally the council had botched their audit report.

We told Peter Hay we were sorry.

We hadn't realized before we pressed him on this question for a couple hours that there was essential information missing from the audit report.

That deputy headteachers Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf had been in the office with Mrs.

Darr as she opened the Muslim TA's envelopes.

This is the one we were mistaken about.

That everyone was present.

Yeah.

Do you remember?

Does that ring a bell?

Yeah.

Peter Hay remembered it immediately.

That it was one of the main things Adderly brought up as they were threatening to take the counsel to court.

So the school was saying, your audit report is so messed up because you couldn't talk to us.

And so we weren't able to tell you that there were two witnesses in the room.

Yeah.

And they were making a big point of that.

I specifically remember the gentleman who went to Australia, Mark Walters.

Thank you.

Because that stands out in my head.

Being clear about not having been interviewed and having things to say.

That's part of their reason for wanting to meet us, was to say, come on a minute, you haven't heard the whole story.

The two witnesses to the envelope opening, Mark Walters and Anila Ashraf, we'd heard about them in our reporting.

They'd both worked with Mrs.

Darr at a previous primary school, and when she got the headteacher job at Adderly, they followed her there.

People who knew these deputy headteachers had a lot to say about Mark Walters, especially.

They told us that he and Mrs.

Darr were very close, like attached at the hip close.

They're both incredibly talented teachers, but that Mrs.

Darr was a leader, and Mark Walters, much more of a follower.

We've heard a number of anecdotes from different people about how devoted an acolyte Mark was to to Mrs.

Darr.

People also told us that Mark Walters had done something surprising, which obviously had stuck with Peter Hay.

After he'd submitted a witness statement to the tribunal saying he'd seen Mrs.

Darr open the envelopes, he abruptly left his job at Adderdee in the middle of a school year and moved far away to Perth, Australia.

He didn't end up testifying at the hearing.

As Brian put it rather succinctly, when he first had this epiphany about the deputies, it raises a question, were they in the room?

Figuring this out, the late timing of these witnesses coming forward, it helped explain so much.

Throughout our investigation, there had been these fleeting moments when we would get a peek into what officials were really saying about Rizvana Dar and Adderly behind the scenes.

Take this with Detective Andrew Bannister, who in the middle of our interview, without us even asking, said,

There were suggestions, and you may well be party to this that rizwana dar is the author of the trojan horse lesser where did you pick that up

it was what it was it was one of the one of the uh hypotheses that was banded around at the at the time

by who

the council or who

by

i think everybody including the media no i think that's something i'd probably

consider

It was a relief to hear Bannister say something so logical.

But when we asked Detective Bannister, okay, so what did you all do to look into that hypothesis, Bannister told us not much of anything.

He said as far as he remembered, the cops did not search Rosvana Darr's computers, or any computers at Adderly at all.

Instead, we know they went and arrested the teaching assistants, searched their electronics for the Trojan horse letter, and used the letter to interrogate the TAs.

For years, we'd been staring at these contortions of logic by officials and couldn't understand them.

Now, they make more sense.

Officials clearly were suspicious of Mrs.

Darr.

Some of them entertained the thought that she could have written the Trojan horse letter.

But here's our best analysis of why everybody dropped it.

When the eyewitnesses spoke up vouching for Mrs.

Darr, saying she did receive resignation letters, suddenly the authorities got rattled.

They thought they missed something huge, testimony that transformed their whole understanding of the resignation dispute.

And that perceived blunder, along with mounting national concern about possible extremism in their city's schools, seemed to inspire in Birmingham officials an overall loss of confidence about their assessments of the Trojan horse letter.

Maybe that letter they'd thought was bogus wasn't so bogus after all.

Maybe it had some other truths in it that they'd overlooked.

So this seemingly tiny question.

Were Mark and Anila really in the room?

It's fundamental, because their statements propped up the resignation letters, which propped up the Trojan horse letter, which propped up the national panic.

These two deputies, their account underpinned the Trojan Horse affair.

Maybe this was the thing you had to go after, to dismantle the social fact of Operation Trojan Horse.

When we approached Anila Ashraf about this, She came to her front door, looked at us coolly, said no comment, and shut the door.

Then she got Birmingham City Council to send our lawyers a threatening letter, claiming that Hamzada had returned to her house a number of times to harass her and her family members, which is absolutely untrue.

When we showed up at Adderley Primary School in hopes of talking with Rosvanna Darr about all this, the front office staff insisted she was off site.

We said we were happy to wait, which we did, until school got out, at which point Mrs.

Darr had a staff member come out to the schoolyard.

to tell us actually she was in the building, but she would not be seeing us.

And then there was the gentleman who went to Australia, now former deputy head of Adderly Primary School, Mark Walters.

I tried to reach him at the new school he worked at in a suburb of Perth, but he was ignoring my calls, ignoring my emails.

And maybe we would have left it at that if we hadn't met a South African dentist who'd had a good relationship with Mark Walters before the Trojan horse affair came between them.

And he urged us, Don't give up on Mark, that Mark might, with some effort, give us some answers.

And the dentist had his own reasons for wanting to see Mark.

And so, in the final installment of the Trojan horse affair, we all three-a doctor, a dentist, and I-set off for one of the most remote cities in the world to chase a remote confession.

Now, let's go, Mark.

There's no point us hanging around.

You came all the way from the UK to meet this man, so let's go meet him.

That's next in an appointment in Perth.

The Trojan Horse Affair is produced by Brian Reed and me along with Rebecca Lex.

The show is edited by Sarah Koenig.

Additional editing by Ira Glass and by contributing editor Aisha Manazir Siddiqui.

Fact-checking and research by Marika Cronolly and Ben Phelan.

Original score by Thomas Meller with additional music by Matt McGinley and Stephen Jackson.

Sound design, mixing and music supervision by Stephen Jackson and Phil Domahovsky at the Audio Non-Visual Company.

Julie Snyder is our executive editor.

Neil Drumming is managing editor.

Supervising producer is ND Chubu.

Executive Assistant is Alberto de Leon.

Sam Dornick is an assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

Special thanks to my high school journalism teacher Debbie Stellavato, along with Krista Stellavato and Gilles Strubant.

Also Jane and Felix Posen, Rebecca Levi and Chesmeni Leonard.

The Trojan Horse Affair is made by Ciro Productions and the New York Times.

Did you know Tide has been upgraded upgraded to provide an even better clean and cold water?

Tide is specifically designed to fight any stain you throw at it, even in cold.

Butter?

Yep.

Chocolate ice cream?

Sure thing.

Barbecue sauce?

Tide's got you covered.

You don't need to use warm water.

Additionally, Tide pods let you confidently fight tough stains with new coldzyme technology.

Just remember, if it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be tide.