London [UK], Feb. 3 : International news agency Reuters has agreed to pay damages and legal cost to North London's Finsbury Park Mosque after it wrongly claimed that the mosque had links with terrorism.
Expressing 'regret' at a High Court, the news agency admitted that publishing a profile based on outdated reports on its global database caused banks to refuse to acknowledge mosques as customer.
Finsbury Park mosque was run by Abu Hamza, who was later convicted of terrorism in the United States, until 2005.
The company which took over, after Hamza's arrest, had its account with HSBC bank closed in June 2014, following the report published by Reuters.
HSBC, in a letter, said 'The provision of banking services. now falls outside of our risk appetite', reports The Nation. After the report, numerous other banks also refused to accept the mosque as a customer. Sara Monsoori, representing the company which now runs the mosque, told the High Court that the Reuters' subscription-only service publishes profiles which also go to subscribers including regulatory bodies and law enforcement agencies.
The mosque's management company was unaware of the profile report until it was drawn to its attention by the BBC a year after its bank account was closed on 20 June 2015.
She said the mosque was subjected to profile reports which placed it in the "terrorism" category. Finsbury Park Mosque said in a statement, "It is unacceptable that any organisation is able to designate people as terrorists on the basis of poor research and for those people to be labelled without any recourse to truth or justice.".
Source: ANI