London, 15 November 2025 (PA Media/dpa/MIA) - US President Donald Trump says he will sue the BBC next week after the corporation apologized but declined to compensate him for its edited version of a 2021 speech broadcast by the "Panorama" programme.

Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump said: "We'll sue them for anywhere between $1 billion and $5 billion, probably sometime next week."

The BBC apologized but said it refused to pay financial compensation.

The corporation said the splicing of the speech was an "error of judgment."

Still, it rejected his compensation demands, after Trump's lawyers threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion in damages unless a retraction and apology were published.

Trump's lawyers had given the BBC a 10 pm (2200 GMT) Friday deadline to respond.

Earlier in the week, Trump said in an interview with Fox News that the BBC had "defrauded the public" over the edit, which made it appear as if he was explicitly urging people to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Separately, Trump told GB News in an interview broadcast on Saturday he felt an "obligation" to take legal action against the public broadcaster.

"I'm not looking to get into lawsuits, but I think I have an obligation to do it," he said.

"This was so egregious. If you don't do it, you don't stop it from happening again with other people."

Chairman Samir Shah has sent a personal letter to the White House to apologize for the editing, and lawyers for the corporation have written to the president's legal team, a BBC spokesperson said.

The spokesperson added: "While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim."

The "Panorama" scandal prompted the resignations of two of the BBC's most senior executives: director-general Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness.

The programme, broadcast a week before the 2024 US election results, spliced two clips together so that Trump appeared to tell the crowd: "We're going to walk down to the Capitol… and I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell."

The broadcaster said it will not air the Panorama episode "Trump: A Second Chance?" again, and published a retraction on the show's webpage on Thursday.

It said: "This programme was reviewed after criticism of how President Donald Trump's 6th January 2021 speech was edited.

"During that sequence, we showed excerpts taken from different parts of the speech.

"However, we accept that our edit unintentionally created the impression that we were showing a single continuous section of the speech, rather than excerpts from different points in the speech, and that this gave the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action.

"The BBC would like to apologise to President Trump for that error of judgment."

A spokesperson added: "The BBC has no plans to rebroadcast the documentary 'Trump: A Second Chance?' on any BBC platforms."

Photo: epa