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This morning Labour MP Lynne Jones called on the BBC to sack presenter Kilroy-Silk, labelling him "racist".

In a statement, the BBC said: "The BBC strongly disassociates itself from the views expressed in an article by Robert Kilroy-Silk in The Sunday Express of 4 January 2004.

We stress that these comments do not reflect the views of the BBC. The BBC is taking the 'Kilroy' programme off air immediately while we investigate this matter fully."

In place of BBC One's 'Kilroy', the BBC will from Monday January 12 broadcast an extended half-hour of 'BBC Breakfast' from 9.00-9.30am to fill the half-hour slot vacated by Kilroy-Silk's show.

The calls to sack the presenter, who is also a former Labour MP, follow the launch of a police investigation after he was reported by the Commission for Racial Equality. CRE chairman Trevor Phillips accused the chatshow host of "trivialising one of the most important and difficult areas of international relations facing the world today".

Jones, who is MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, said the BBC must consider his position and called on fellow MPs to join her in condemning Kilroy's Sunday Express article. She has tabled a Commons motion condemning his "racist comments" and "abhorrent contention".

The Muslim Council of Britain also denounced the piece as a "gratuitous anti-Arab rant". The council secretary general Iqbal Sacranie said in a letter to BBC One controller Lorraine Heggessey that Kilroy-Silk had failed to distinguish between the terrorists in the September 11 attacks and 200m "ordinary Arab peoples".

The piece, headlined "We owe the Arabs nothing", argued: "We're told the Arabs loathe us. Really? What do they think we feel about them? That we adore them for the way they murdered more than 3,000 civilians on 11 September and then danced in the hot, dusty streets to celebrate the murders?"

His piece also mistakenly confused Iranians with Arabs and alleged that thousands of asylum seekers from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries were "living happily" in Britain on Social Security.

In a strange twist, it emerged yesterday that this is the second time in nine months that the Sunday Express had published the article under Kilroy-Silk's name. It also appeared on April 6 last year, with a different headline and slightly different editing.

The first time the piece was published, at the height of the war in Iraq, it went unnoticed.

Anita Land, Kilroy-Silk's agent, claimed that the repetition was a mistake by the Sunday Express, while the paper's editor Martin Townsend claimed in emails that "the views expressed in Robert's column are not those of the newspaper".

The BBC is looking into how Kilroy-Silk's Express column fits in with his BBC work where he has presented a morning chat show for more than a decade called 'Kilroy'. The BBC has recently imposed restrictions on freelance writing by its staff in the wake of the Hutton Inquiry.

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