A FIREARMS officer claims his superior officer’s wife filmed him on her mobile phone as he worked out at the gym.

Nadeem Saddique, who is pursuing a claim for racial discrimination against Cleveland Police, said he noticed Joanne Charlesworth taking footage of him on her phone at David Lloyd gym in Stockton, while he exercised to recover from a back injury.

PC Saddique, from Ingleby Barwick, near Stockton, told the hearing that he saw her speaking to someone on her phone before she started to film him.

The officer was on sick leave from his role as an armed response officer at Cleveland Police with a back injury he had sustained while training.

He said he had been advised by doctors to undertake gentle exercise to speed up his recovery.

PC Saddique told the employment tribunal hearing at Teesside Magistrates Court: “My complaint was that she was videoing me, and the whole point of her videoing me was to capture me doing an exercise which would contradict that I had a back injury. She was trying to capture me doing something that I should not be. That is my accusation.”

He said he believed Mrs Charlesworth had been asked to film him by her husband, Sergeant Duncan Charlesworth, a senior officer in the firearms unit. PC Saddique said his previously good working relationship with Sgt Charlesworth had soured before the incident.

PC Saddique made an official complaint about workplace bullying to Cleveland Police after the incident and asked that Mrs Charlesworth’s phone was seized to be checked by the force’s technical team, “before she had the chance to delete it”.

Richard Oulton, representing Cleveland Police, said that Sgt Charlesworth claimed he had offered his wife’s phone to the technical support unit for analysis but this was declined.

Mr Oulton said PC Saddique’s evidence that Mrs Charlesworth had been filming him was “an assumption”.

“It is his (Sgt Charlesworth’s) evidence that he had absolutely no idea that you had that injury,” he said.

PC Saddique said: “I do dispute that. He is the senior firearms instructor. I find it hard to understand that, if a student is injured while at the range in firearms training, it is recorded. He would have been informed of a student being injured.”

Mr Oulton said: “He didn’t know about the injury, and neither did his wife.”

Cleveland Police denies the claims of racial discrimination. The case continues.