It was surely one of the most anticipated verdicts in recent British criminal history. Following a thuggish brawl at Manchester Airport on July 23 last year, Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, 20, from Rochdale, was yesterday convicted for his callous assaults on two female police officers.
At Liverpool Crown Court, he was found guilty of causing actual bodily harm to PC Lydia Ward and assaulting PC Ellie Cook.
This brute, who thinks nothing of punching women in the face, remains in custody. I hope they throw the book at him.
The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the allegation that Amaaz, together with his brother Muhammad Amaad, 26, also assaulted a male officer, PC Zachary Marsden. But the woman-punching coward Mohammed has been served with justice.
While we should cheer his guilty verdict, we should not yet lay the case to rest. For many unsettling questions still swirl around it.
For one: why did it take so long to bring charges against the men, even though there was graphic CCTV footage of the melee, in which it could clearly be seen that a female police officer was punched so hard her nose was broken? More than a year passed before this conviction was secured.
And for another: why did so many politicians and Left-wing commentators rush to claim that it was the brothers who were somehow the ‘victims’, when in fact one had savagely attacked the officers?
I am not alone in having a niggling feeling that such savagery might have been dealt with far more swiftly had the perpetrator been white.
A mugshot of Mohammed Amaaz released by Greater Manchester Police after the airport attack
Mohammed Amaaz, left, and his brother Muhammad Amaad arriving at Liverpool Crown Court
The court was provided with CCTV footage showing the moment PC Lydia Ward was punched
To see how speedily justice can be served by the State when it chooses to, cast your mind back to the violence that erupted across Britain around one week after the airport brawl.
The Southport riots last summer convulsed the country — after communities erupted in fury over the murder of three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class, many wrongly believing the perpetrator to be a Muslim asylum seeker. The rioters, almost all white, were charged with exceptional speed and harshness.
Lucy Connolly wrote her now-infamous tweet about ‘setting fire’ to migrant hotels on July 29 that year. Five weeks later, on September 2, she was in the dock. She received her exemplary sentence – 31 months in the slammer – before the end of October.
Yes, Connolly pleaded guilty. Even so, how can a woman be arrested, charged and jailed for a mere tweet in three months, but it takes more than a year to serve justice to a young man who used extreme violence against, I emphasise, two female police officers?
A glance at the key facts of Amaaz’s case may help to provide an answer. The brawl took place in the multi-storey car-park of Terminal 2 at Manchester Airport.
The first thing we knew of it was a selectively edited and grainy mobile-phone clip, lasting just 44 seconds, which emerged within hours of the incident. This showed a man – whom we now know was Amaaz – lying face-down on the floor with a male police officer’s boot on his head.
The clip, which showed none of the preceding fracas, went viral. Outraged Left-wingers on social media seized on it as evidence of ‘police brutality’, luridly comparing it to the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, which sparked the Black Lives Matter riots.
Labour MP Lucy Powell, the Leader of the House of Commons, called the footage ‘incredibly disturbing’ and ‘raised her concerns’ with Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. (Powell, you may remember, was forced to apologise in Parliament in May after dismissing the predominantly Pakistani rape-gang scandal as ‘dog-whistle’ politics.)
PC Ward had her nose broken by Amaaz, who also attacked another female officer and a tourist
Amaaz was eventually restrained, with footage showing PC Zachary Marsden kicking his head
At the time, Cooper was quick to stress she understood the ‘widespread distress’ the footage had caused – to Left-wingers, that is, rather than to those appalled at this assault on police – and said she had spoken to officers about taking ‘urgent steps’. To her shame, the Home Secretary remained silent about the fact that a female officer’s nose had been broken by this vile thug – even though it was her job to know this.
The Guardian, too, frothed over the footage, stirring the pot by saying it showed a police officer ‘forcefully kicking the head of a man’ who was already ‘incapacitated’.
Imams in Manchester were soon raging against the ‘horrific actions’ of the police. Accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ began to trend on social media and a mob of about 200 angry Asian men gathered outside Rochdale police station, chanting: ‘GMP [Greater Manchester Police], shame on you!’ Two weeks later, detectives released images of five men they wanted to identify as they investigated an ‘outbreak of disorder’ that night.
It would have been wiser if these fools and agitators had reserved their moral judgment. For there soon emerged – in intriguing but still-opaque circumstances – CCTV footage showing what happened before Amaaz was lying on the floor – and this was deeply revealing.
The brothers, we soon learnt, had got into an altercation earlier with an airport passenger who had supposedly racially ‘insulted’ their mother. Amaaz chose to deal with this situation by headbutting that passenger in the airport’s Starbucks. When police caught up with him, all hell broke loose.
Whatever Powell and her liberal chums might think, what was ‘disturbing’ was not the police’s restraint of Amaaz but his own savage assault. Had he acted like that in an airport in the United States, he would likely have been shot dead.
The elites were so hungry for childish morality tales about the police and the ‘victimisation’ of ethnic and religious minorities, they rushed to negative interpretations of an incident that even a child could have guessed was likely to be more complicated than the edited footage suggested.
And in the process, they demonised our brave front-line police, whipped up sectarian anger and flattered the self-pitying narrative of a woman-hitting brute.
Powell has apologised once recently for her misjudgement. She should do so again – and then resign.
So what of the fact that it took so long for this saga to reach its conclusion? It is frankly bizarre that it was not until just before Christmas that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) even authorised charges against the brothers. The conviction took more than year.
What did the CPS do for five months? The case was open-and-shut; CCTV footage was available from the get-go. To put things in context, according to its own data, it currently takes an average of 44 days for the CPS to bring charges against a suspect. In this case, it took three times as long.
No clear explanation for this delay has been offered by the outfit Keir Starmer ran before he entered politics – but I have one theory.
Tensions, as I said, were running high among local Muslims in the aftermath of the incident. Swiftly charging the brothers, however compelling the evidence, could have risked things turning uglier.
There is also the crippling fear of being accused of ‘racism’ or ‘Islamophobia’ that afflicts our public bodies, and especially the police.
The rape-gang scandal, so airily dismissed by Powell, was of course exacerbated by the same anxiety: council officials and police were so fearful of being called ‘Islamophobic’ they failed to investigate the heinous crimes largely Pakistani Muslim perpetrators were meting out to white, working-class English girls for decades.
The Left still claims it is some sort of ‘far-Right conspiracy’ to suggest we live in a two-tier justice system. And, yes, Amaaz has got the conviction he deserved. But the delays in this case are troubling – and smack of moral cowardice.
