Judge: newspaper justified in firing editor for falsified stories

The court in Amsterdam decided on Tuesday that Trouw newspaper was justified in dismissing journalist Perdiep Ramesar. Ramesar was fired when Trouw discovered that some of his sources were untraceable. Ramesar fought his dismissal with a lawsuit. Ramesar was a city reporter for Trouw in the Hague. He was dismissed in November after editors discovered that some of the sources he quoted in his articles were nowhere to be found. Trouw then had a committee investigate his stories. The investigation showed that Ramesar used inexplicably many anonymous sources. People he mentioned by name could not be traced. On Saturday Trouw pulled a total of 126 of Ramesar's articles. One of these articles is a controversial story about the existence of a "Sharia triangle" in Schilderswijk in the Hague. But Ramesar also possibly fabricated sources for less controversial stories, such as an article of a beached whale. Ramesar also previously worked for the AD. That newspaper deleted all of Ramesar's articles from its website and archives. This was done without an investigation and as a "precaution".