The disciplinary action taken by the University of Edinburgh over a student who posed as a ‘gay girl’ blogger in Syria has now been released.

Tom MacMaster’s blog caught the attention of the world in the summer when political violence was escalating.

MacMaster claimed his ‘Gay Girl in Damascus,’ was the work of ‘Amina Arraf’ – who he invented as a US citizen, lesbian, literate and leftist watching events unfolding on the front-line of the turmoil in the Syrian capital.

In fact he had invented it all, working from computers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

University documents show that press coverage of MacMaster’s fakery spread around the world with reports in all the main British newspapers and afar afield as India, China, Canada and the USA.

It emerged that MacMaster had written under the Amina Arraf pen-name before, but it was the first time it had achieved such attention or notoriety. Journalists from CNN and Gay Middle East had questioned the reliability of the Amina Arraf blog in May but it was only revealed to be faked in the summer.

On 13 June, the day after the hoax emerged and the university realised MacMaster was a visiting student from the US doing a masters degree, university officials promised a full investigation and immediately suspended his ‘computing privileges’.

After that the university was more-or-less silent on the issue. But now, thanks to a Freedom of Information request from LGBT blogger Michael Petrelis they have released a 55-page package of documents about the case, mostly showing the email exchange between university colleagues on the matter.

From these one limited bit of action taken by the University of Edinburgh emerges.

A letter written by Vice Principal for Equality and Diversity, Professor Lorraine Waterhouse and CIO Jeff Haywood on 28 June requests that MacMaster ‘must give, in writing, an unequivocal assurance that you will not engage in any further actions of this kind whilst a student of this university.’

He responded on 1 July with a letter which says: ‘I will not engage in any further actions of this kind whilst a student of the university.’

However the majority of both these letters, beyond these two fragments has been blacked out by university officials citing data protection laws. As a result, it is not clear whether further disciplinary action was taken against MacMaster.

Gay Star News contacted the university this morning to raise this question and a spokeswoman again confirmed they were not going to release any more information about the investigation or it’s outcome, again saying they were prevented from doing so by data protection legislation.

For Petrelis, who made repeated requests to the university to make the results of their investigation public, this is a disappointment. On his blog he says: ‘In my view, the university was shamefully lax in holding MacMaster to account and was all too willing to keep the public in the dark about the results of the investigation, which are omitted from the 55-page file.’