A jury delivered guilty verdicts on brawls at Manchester Airport last year which triggered heated protests on alleged police brutality over viral social media footage.
A man who headbutted a member of the public at a British airport and then assaulted police officers when they arrived to arrest him over the incident has been found guilty on several but not all charges. At the conclusion of a three week trial at Liverpool Crown Court the jury after 10 hours of deliberation found Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, a 20-year-old student who lives in Manchester, guilty of assaulting and causing actual bodily harm to Police Constable Lydia Ward, of assaulting armed Police Constable Ellie Cook, and of assaulting Abdulkareem Hamzah Abbas Ismaeil, reports Sky News.
The court heard Amaaz and his brother Muhammad Amaad, 26, had travelled to collect their mother from Manchester Airport after her flight from Qatar, and that she had complained of being allegedly racially abused on the flight by Ismaeil. The mother pointed Ismaeil out to her sons as they walked through the airport, it was stated, and Amaaz explained this is why he confronted Ismaeil at a branch of Starbucks in the airport before headbutting and punching him.
Police then arrived to arrest Amaaz. A significant brawl broke out and security footage shown to the court showed both Amaaz and Amaad tousling with police, leading to Constable Ward having her nose significantly bloodied in the scrap. The court had previously heard the mother also attempted to involve herself in the fight and came away with a black eye.
In his defence, Amaaz said he was defending himself from a police officer who he said was a “lunatic”, armed officer Constable Zachary Marsden. The jury were unable to reach a verdict on whether both Amaaz and Amaad assaulted Marsden, and the prosecutor say they will seek a retrial on these charges.
The assaults, which took place on the 23rd of July 2024, quickly became public knowledge when footage emerged on social media of PC Marsden allegedly kicking Amaaz in the head. This triggered major protests and “riots” in Muslim communities in the north-west which, critics said, were lightly policed compared to later protests the same summer over the Southport killings where officers were seen to crack down hard.
In particular, some raised questions at the time over why the Manchester Airport protests had been met with sympathy by the government, while anti-child killing protests over Southport had been called “disgraceful”. As reported at the time:
Lord Goldsmith said on Tuesday night that the Home Secretary’s statement “couldn’t contrast more starkly with [previous] reactions to the Manchester riots where violent thugs demanded instant justice ‘or else’ & where Ministers bent over backwards to explain that they ‘understood’ the anger.”
He asked: “Why has the Home Office response to these two events been so different? Can they not see how this feeds the narrative of a two tier approach and drives people to the far right? It is extraordinarily shortsighted and unwise.”
The Manchester riots Goldsmith namechecked took place last week in response to a social media video of a man, identified as member of the Muslim community, at Manchester airport being kicked in the head by a police officer. The Home Secretary issued a statement at the time which went to some effort to express sympathy with the local community — some members of which had already been rioting by this point — and talking up “engagement… with local communities”.
Cooper said on the 25th in response to Manchester: “I share the deep concern surrounding the video and understand the widespread distress it will have caused… It is essential that the police have the trust of communities and the public rightly expect high standards from those in charge of keeping us safe.”
Later, further footage emerged of the Manchester Airport fight which showed the context of the arrest, including a police constable having her nose broken, which had hitherto been missing. Nevertheless, the defence team claimed during the trial the police officers had been the aggressors, had impaired judgement because of “red mist” descending upon them.
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