• Sweeping child abuse scandal shakes BBC and other British institutions

    BBC Director General George Entwistle resigned on Saturday as the BBC spiraled further into scandal over its coverage of two separate sex abuse cases – one, a cover up, and the other, a possible wrongful accusation. NBC's Keir Simmons reports.

    By Keir Simmons, NBC News

    The director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, George Entwistle, resigned Saturday after only 54 days in the role -  the latest to be caught in the wake of a child sex-abuse scandal that has thrown the 90-year-old publicly funded behemoth and other U.K. institutions into deepening turmoil.

    The scandal, which began with allegations against a single former BBC employee, has since engulfed hospitals, children’s homes, even the police.

    It also poses questions for Mark Thompson, Entwistle's immediate predecessor, who on Monday becomes chief executive of The New York Times.

    For an entire week, one of the BBC's key news shows suggested a leading Conservative party politician, who wasn’t named, had been involved in the rape of a young boy in Wales decades ago. The man accused denied it; the victim himself now says it was a case of mistaken identity.

    Many networks ran interviews with the victim -- one even asked whether a pedophile network had been protected by a masonic conspiracy. Did a judge who led an early inquiry into the abuse at a North Wales children’s home deliberately hide the names of famous or influential abusers?

    Max Nash / AP

    The BBC Director General, George Entwistle, announces his resignation from the BBC outside New Broadcasting House in central London, Saturday Nov. 10.

    In front of 1 million television viewers, a morning TV host handed a list of alleged pedophiles to the British Prime Minister David Cameron live on air. That list, allegedly including the names of other senior politicians, was compiled based on unsubstantiated Internet rumors. 

    The revelation that all of this was a mistake is once again causing Britain's media organizations to question their own values, only months after news of newspaper phone-hacking. It has filled Britain with outrage, astonishment and self-doubt. 

    The scandal had begun with separate claims that BBC - one of the most respected brands in journalism worldwide - had failed to expose the late BBC children's television personality and fundraiser, Jimmy Savile, as a pedophile even though it had interviewed several victims who made allegations against the star. 

    It’s now clear those allegations are well founded. Yet the same BBC program, 'Newsnight', that shelved the original and apparently accurate Savile story was the first to broadcast the latest false allegations. 

    'Newsnight' has apologized on air for its mistake, another inquiry has been launched, and the program has temporarily suspended all its investigatory work. On Saturday, Entwistle, who took his post in September, resigned in response to the growing scandal after a humiliating interview on the BBC’s own flagship radio news program, 'Today'. The BBC is in crisis.

    BBC boss Entwistle quits amid turmoil over network's child sex abuse scandal

    On Sunday, the head of the BBC's governing body - former Thatcher-era government minister Lord Patten - admitted the issue of public trust in BBC journalism was paramount, and said a "thorough, radical, structural overhaul" of the organization was now necessary.

    Savile had been a British institution, presenting TV shows during the 1970s and '80s that attracted huge audiences. Now police investigators suspect that he was abusing hundreds of children, even on BBC property.

    One man described how, at the age of 9, he went to be part of the audience for the Savile show "Jim’ll Fix It." He says Savile abused him in a dressing room.

    “He put his hand on my knee and started touching me,” the man said in an interview.  “And grabbed my hand and forced it on top of his trousers. I was absolutely petrified.”

    The allegations became public only weeks after the departure of Entwistle's predecessor, Mark Thompson, who starts his job as NYT chief executive on Monday.

    In a statement last month, quoted by The New York Times, Thompson said, “During my time as director general of the BBC, I never heard any allegations or received any complaints about Jimmy Savile.”

    Lewis Whyld / AP

    Jimmy Savile is shown in a March 2008 file photo.

    But NBC News has spoken to one of the journalists who broke the Savile story. He says he called Thompson’s office in May and outlined the allegations to his personal assistant.

    “I absolutely remember saying it,” says Miles Goslett. “I always felt it extraordinary that no senior people in the BBC including Mark Thompson as director general addressed this issue.”

    When asked about Goslett’s allegations, the BBC sent NBC News a prepared statement regarding Thompson’s knowledge of the affair:

    “Mark Thompson has repeatedly made clear he had no personal knowledge of the allegations. While Ms. Cecil recalls Mr Goslett telephoning her to complain about a Freedom of Information request she does not recall that he mentioned the nature of the allegations against Savile." (Click here for the BBC’s full statements on the affair )

    Jessica Cecil is the head of the director general's office.

    This week NBC News approached Thompson for an interview, after a lecture he gave at Oxford University. Thompson declined, saying he wanted to wait for the outcome of that BBC inquiry.

    But whatever its conclusions, the implications for the BBC are already becoming clear. Trust in the institution had dropped from 62 percent in 2009 to 47 percent last week, according to a poll conducted by one of the BBC’s own radio stations.

    It is not alone. This scandal has rocked people’s faith in many of Britain’s institutions and left a country questioning itself and its elite.

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  • 'We were trapped inside': Pakistan factory fires kill at least 261

    At least 166 people were killed in a fire in Karachi, Pakistan. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.

    By NBC News staff and wire reports

    Updated at 8:40 a.m. ET: KARACHI, Pakistan -- At least 261 people burned to death as separate fires swept through two factories in Pakistan, police and government officials said Wednesday, raising questions about industrial safety in the country.

    Flames raced through a garment factory in the teeming commercial capital of Karachi, killing 236 people. Weeping relatives in hospitals and morgues heaped criticism on the deeply unpopular government.

    "People started screaming for their lives," said Mohammad Asif, 20. "Everyone came to the window. I jumped from the third floor."

     

    Rehan Khan / EPA

    A man tries to identify body of his relative at a mortuary following a huge fire at a garment factory in Karachi, Pakistan, Wednesday.

    In the eastern city of Lahore, a fire raged in a shoe factory, killing at least 25 people.

    More photos: Blazes at factories in Karachi and Lahore

    Critics say Pakistan's corrupt and ineffective government has failed to tackle the country's problems. The country is racked by a Taliban insurgency, widespread poverty, spiraling crime and daily power cuts.

    "The owners were more concerned with safeguarding the garments in the factory than the workers," said garment factory employee Mohammad Pervez, holding up a photograph of his cousin, who is also a worker there and is missing. "If there were no metal grills on the windows a lot of people would have been saved. The factory was overflowing with garments and fabrics. Whoever complained was fired."

    The Guardian newspaper quoted injured factory worker Mohammad Ilyas, who also said that bars on the windows had stopped workers from escaping easily:

    "Some of us quickly took tools and machines to break the iron bars," he said, speaking from a hospital in Karachi, the Guardian reported. "That's how we managed to jump out of the windows down to the ground floor."

    "Within two minutes there was fire in the entire factory," said worker Liaqat Hussain, 29, from his hospital bed where he was being treated for burns all over his body. "The gate was closed. There was no access to get out, we were trapped inside."

    Supplied international firms?
    Ali Ahmad, 33, who owns a Karachi firm called Nizam Textiles, which does not own or operate either of the affected factories, said the Karachi factory was owned by two brothers. One was out of the country and the other was missing, he said.

    "The word in the industry is that he has gone AWOL, which is, frankly, a natural reaction to the way the cops and media are investigating this," he told NBC News.

    Ahmad said the factory likely supplied the international market.

    "If these factory owners had international clients, that means they had to worry about social compliance, which is a trip or two per year from the compliance and standards guys and other auditors who report to their foreign buyers," he said. "If the social compliance checks had been failed by the factory owners, and they were still producing for foreign buyers, then this is both a local and an international crime. It's also an ethical problem for international buyers."

    He said it was difficult being an entrepreneur in Pakistan.

    "You have strikes, load shedding [power outages], local mafias charging you turf protection money -- you name it," Ahmad said. "Plus you have ruthless buyers sitting in the U.S. who don't care what you do, as long as you do it on time ... we take a hit every time we're late. That means lost margins. That means we do what we need to do to make our orders, fast. This factory owner may have been working extra shifts just for that purpose." 

    'New radicals': Pakistan's Generation Y battles to shape country's future

    On Wednesday, a provincial minister ordered an inspection of all factories and industrial plants in Sindh province within 48 hours. Karachi, home to 18 million people, is the capital of Sindh.

    A preliminary provincial government report on the Lahore fire concluded that the closure of the emergency exits led to the deaths and labor and safety regulations were not applied, government sources said.

    Asif Hassan / AFP - Getty Images

    Pakistani firefighters work to extinguish a sudden fire after it trapped dozens of workers in a factory in Lahore on Tuesday.

    At a Karachi hospital, about 30 bodies burned beyond recognition were lined up at a morgue.

    "There is no space left here. It's full," said ambulance worker Wasif Ali. "They keep coming."

    Senior Superintendent of Police Amir Farooqi told Reuters that police were raiding buildings in different parts of Karachi to search for the factory owners.

    In Pakistan's largest city, 'Old Glory' is flammable and profitable

    Farooqi said 35 people were injured in the garment factory fire and bodies were still being recovered from the facility, which employed about 450 people.

    The latest death toll in Karachi was 236, said police chief Iqbal Mahmood.

    Slideshow: Pakistan: A nation in turmoil

    Muhammed Muheisen / AP

    Images of daily life, political pursuits, religious rites and deadly violence.

    Launch slideshow

    Smoke was still rising from the factory as rescue workers pulled out charred corpses and covered them in white sheets. Relatives of workers stood in the street awaiting word of their fate. Several wept.

    Aid workers become targets as Pakistan faces new humanitarian crisis

    The cause of the garment factory fire was not clear.

    In Lahore, workers at the shoe factory suspected that the fire was caused by a problem with a generator.

    "We saw our colleagues burning alive, in flames," said Shabdir Hussain, from his hospital bed. "We could do nothing. We saved our lives by jumping from the roof."

    US, Pakistan should 'divorce,' ex-ambassador to Washington says

    Al-Jazeera reported that the factory had been built illegally in a residential part of Lahore.

    Successive governments have been unable to provide a reliable power supply so factories have to have their own generators, powered by diesel or petrol, if they want to avoid regular, lengthy power cuts.

    NBC News’ Waj Khan in Islamabad and Reuters contributed to this report.

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