BBC News Reporter Reveals Racist Death Threats From Man Later Found To Have Firearms At Home

deadline.com:

One of the BBC’s most senior news journalists has revealed that he received death threats back in 2017, deemed so serious that the man sending them was later detained.

Clive Myrie, who is Black, told The Times newspaper this weekend that, after returning from reporting duty in the US, he was approached by BBC security, who informed him that a 66-year-old British man had left threats to kill him, using racist language to describe him and saying, “Myrie best stay in Vegas because just guess who has gone to the top of the list and he is much easier,” and “does he know not to call himself an Englishman and does he know he’s at the top of my list.” Myrie, who has worked for the BBC for 36 years and won numerous awards including for his most recent despatches from Ukraine, told The Times he felt uneasy but dismissed the messages as “banter from a sad racist.” However, it later transpired that the man had sent 27 threatening messages between 2015 and 2017, and had previously been arrested for posting a menu with racist messages to an Indian restaurant.

Police had found firearms at his home and the man had served a jail sentence. Myrie, who has written a memoir detailing his parents’ background in Jamaica and their journey to the UK as part of the Windrush generation, as well as his own upbringing in 1970s Britain, told The Times: “It used to get me really wound up, you know, that some bloke would send faeces in the mail.

But now I just have overwhelming pity for these people, that they’re so filled with this hatred or this bile that it comes out in this way.