Teacher says he was unfairly sacked for role in Maggie Q movie

A native-English-speaking teacher who claims he was sacked from a secondary school over his involvement in the erotic thriller Naked Weapon alongside actress Maggie Q has accused school managers of 'ruining his life, career and happiness'.

Mark Aldred, 44, from Cairns, Australia, whose contract at Holy Carpenter Secondary School, Kowloon, was terminated over a disagreement as to what constitutes 'work outside school', told a labour tribunal yesterday he had since applied to 400 schools without success.

Principal James Tsui told the tribunal that Mr Aldred was given a month's notice in October last year because school managers considered promotional material and photographs from the film on his website to be 'work'.

But Mr Aldred says the school dismissed him unfairly because he appeared in the movie - in which Maggie Q snaps his spine during a massage - before he joined the school in August 2002. He had at no time worked on the website, which was run by a professional Australian webmaster, and the process by which he was dismissed did not follow proper procedure.

Questioning school secretary Reverend Cheng Ho-ming, Mr Aldred asked whether he had checked his facts before writing a letter to the Education and Manpower Bureau on October 7 last year informing it of his sacking. He said references to website photographs being for sale and claims he had worked on the site were false.

Reverend Cheng said he believed the claims to be true, although he could not remember who the 'various sources' of his information were and could not recall whether bureau procedures had been followed in the run-up to the sacking.

'You do things that ruin a man's life, career and happiness and contravene his rights and don't bother to check the facts or get his views on them? Is it just daily administration to destroy someone's career,' Mr Aldred asked.