Broadcaster makes last-minute edit to Stacey Dooley documentary before it airs on BBC One

The BBC has apologised and amended a Panorama documentary presented by Stacey Dooley after she inadvertently described a Muslim prayer sign as a terrorist salute.

Stacey Meets the IS Brides, which is due to be shown on BBC One on Monday night, features the presenter travelling to camps in Syria to meet women who left their own countries to join Islamic State.

In one scene, trailed on Sunday night’s News at Ten, Dooley described leaving a camp and watching “women raising their index finger in an IS salute” – without making it clear that the gesture also had another meaning.

Isis fighters have often deployed the single-finger gesture in propaganda images but Tell MAMA, an organisation which measures anti-Muslim attacks, pointed out that the symbol had a much wider use representing Muslims’ commitment to monotheism.

“Tawhid (Tawheed) is the defining doctrine of Islam, demonstrating the oneness of Allah (God),” they said. “To reduce such a fundamental and important concept to a mere ‘IS salute’ is grossly wrong, ignorant, and damaging. This again demonstrates the importance of having Muslim representation in media, and more broadly, improving religious literacy.”

The BBC said they would remove the relevant voiceover from Dooley’s documentary before broadcast, in addition to editing programmes and online clips which had already been published.

Both the Mirror and the Sun have since edited articles on their websites which repeated the claims that the hand sign was an IS symbol.

“We wrongly described a gesture made by women filmed in a Kurdish controlled detention camp in northern Syria as an ‘IS salute’,” said a BBC spokesman.

“While IS have attempted to adopt this for their own propaganda purposes, for accuracy we should have been clear that many people of Muslim faith use this gesture to signify the oneness of Allah. We apologise for this error and have removed this description from the footage.”

• This article was amended on 6 August 2019 to change the main photo. The original image was of Dooley with Yazidi fighters in an unrelated documentary broadcast in 2016.