NEW YORK, March 10: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has suspended the head chaplain of the city’s jails, pending a probe into alleged remarks he made about the world’s top terrorists living in the White House.

Umar Abdul-Jalil, who is also the imam of a mosque in Harlem, had been placed on paid administrative leave, Mr Bloomberg said in a weekly radio broadcast on Friday.

“We told him we wanted to do an investigation and not to come to work,” Bloomberg said.

“I’m looking at this case myself,” he added.

The row surrounding Abdul-Jalil stems from two speeches he gave last year to a conference sponsored by a Muslim students association in Arizona.

On recordings of the speeches, unearthed by the New York Post this week, Abdul-Jalil could be heard talking about how Jews control the media and saying that ‘the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House’.—AFP