[2] His father was the Palestinian Christian broadcaster Isa Sabbagh [ar], at the time working for the BBC Arabic Service;[3] his mother, born Pamela Graydon, was English, of American and Irish parentage.
His parents divorced soon after he was born and his father later lived in the United States, but Karl (originally named Khalil after his grandfather) remained in England with his mother.
He was the producer of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, ‘The natural history of a sunbeam’, by George Porter, in 1976 and ‘The planets’, by Carl Sagan, in 1977.
The book includes a critical account of the Zionist settlement and eventual takeover of Palestine in the first half of the 20th century.
[5][6][2] In September 2019 Sabbagh was jailed for 45 months and put on the sex-offenders register for life after being convicted of grooming a 14-year-old girl.