Officer suspended after 'jungle monkey" slur!

It seems that racism still exists all over the world...................

The race row that has inflamed the US took a bizarre twist last night when a Boston police officer was suspended for abusing the Harvard scholar Professor Henry Louis Gates and calling him "a banana-eating jungle monkey".

Hours before President Barack Obama was to sit down at the White House for a beer with Professor Gates and Sergeant James Crowley to calm tensions over the academic's arrest, it emerged that another police officer, Justin Barrett, was accused of sending an insulting e-mail about Professor Gates to a local newspaper.

In a furious and at times ungrammatical rant at a reporter on the Boston Globe, the anonymous e-mail, allegedly written by Officer Barrett said: "If I were the officer he (Professor Gates) verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (capsicum spray)."

Later in the e-mail, quoted in full on the website MyFoxBoston.com. the 36-year-old former English teacher suggested the headline for the newspaper's article on Professor Gates' arrest should read: "Conduct Unbecoming a Jungle Monkey - back to one's roots."

The Boston Police Department suspended Mr Barrett when the existence of the e-mail became known. A spokesman for the police force said in a statement: "Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis placed Officer Justin Barrett, 36, on administrative leave pending the outcome of a termination hearing.

"Commissioner Davis was made aware of a correspondence with racist remarks and yesterday removed the officer of his gun and badge."

Sergeant Crowley's arrest of Professor Gates at his home near Boston last week set off an impassioned national debate on the issues of racial profiling, exacerbated after President Obama ill-advisedly stepped into the row.

The Times