Watch: Moment Two Brothers “Assaulted Police Officers Trying to Arrest Them at Manchester Airport”
The moment when two brothers allegedly assaulted police officers as they tried to arrest them at Manchester Airport last summer – leading to a viral edited video of a police officer kicking one in the face – was shown to a jury today. The Mail has more.
Captured from two angles by CCTV cameras, it shows the violence which broke out when police attempted to detain Mohammed Fahir Amaaz at a pay station.
He had been identified as having headbutted a passenger at a Starbucks café in the arrivals area minutes before, Liverpool Crown Court has heard.
Jurors were told that the violence which broke out beside the car park pay station at 8.28pm on July 23rd last year lasted for just three minutes.
Amaaz was seen to throw 10 punches at the officers during the violence while his brother – Muhammad Amaad, 26, who is also on trial – threw six.
Amaaz also threw two elbow strikes and kicked the officers, one of whom suffered a broken nose, jurors heard.
The clips shown to the jury show Amaad at the pay station before his brother steps alongside him as the trio of officers enter the lobby.
Pc Zachary Marsden – who was armed – is then seen taking Amaaz by the arm and placing his other hand on the back of his head.
The armed officer said he lashed out as he feared one of the brothers was trying to take his pistol out of its holster during the struggle. …
Having “deemed” that his assailant was “a threat”, Pc Marsden said he struck Amaad in the face with his first in an attempt to push him away.
But the officer said Amaad – who was “taller and larger build than me” – then grabbed his body armour, dragged him to the bench and subjected him to “blows from all directions”. …
During the attack he said his glasses fell off, meaning he could not see clearly more than an arm’s length in front of his face due to his short-sightedness.
“Throughout the incident I was fearful for my firearm,” he added.
Two female officers, PC Ellie Cook – also armed – and PC Lydia Ward – who was unarmed – take his other arm.
His brother Amaad then approaches from behind and takes hold of Pc Marsden who responds by throwing a punch.
Amaad then puts his hand around Pc Marsden’s throat and forces him towards a seating area where he punches him twice in the head.
As Amaad throws further punches, his brother Mohammed Fahir Amaaz punches and elbows the female officers – first PC Cook and then PC Ward – to their heads.
After punching Pc Marsden six times, Amaad is then seen sitting with both hands behind his head while the officer draws his Taser.
At that point, jurors were told the footage shows how Amaaz throws a series of punches at Pc Marsden, who falls to the ground.
Then Pc Cook is seen firing her Taser at Amaaz who also falls to the ground.
Meanwhile Pc Marsden gets to his feet and is seen kicking Amaaz’s head and also stamping towards it, apparently without making contact.
The brothers’ mother is seen in the footage leaning over Amaaz as Pc Marsden pushes her head with his Taser before pointing it at Amaad, who is still seated.
Giving evidence, Pc Marsden explained why he was forced to take such action against during the alleged altercation. …
As Amaaz fell to the ground, Pc Marsden said he instructed him to put his hands behind his back.
But he said Amaaz ignored his command and began to raise his chest.
Needing to “act quickly”, and with the wires of his Taser still connected to the barbs in Amaad’s chest, Pc Marsden said he kicked Amaaz in the face “using the soft, laced part of my boot”.
Asked by Mr Greaney if there was an element of “retaliation” in his decision to kick the prone suspect, Pc Marsden replied: “I would strongly dispute that.”
He added: “I don’t believe I lost my temper or was angry.”
Pc Marsden said he then attempted to stamp down onto the wire of his radio which was dangling from his uniform to stop Amaaz grabbing it.
But he missed due to not yet having recovered his glasses.
At that point he said the brothers’ mother started to ‘interfere’, grabbing at his arm and leg and causing him to push her away using his Taser.
Worth reading in full.
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I can’t help wonder: a short-sighted firearms officer who without his glasses “could not see clearly more than an arm’s length in front of his face”! I’m not doubting the professionalism of the officer at all, they need our support, but isn’t that a concerning contradiction?
I would expect that he would wear a device to keep his glasses where they should be.
But yes, I see your point.
Agreed. This is a detail that I think was unknown up until now. To me, it seems really unsafe and inappropriate for police to wear glasses in the first place, especially in a role such as this, where physical altercations are to be expected. Maybe contact lenses would be okay, as they tend to not get knocked out of one’s eyes, but glasses? On an officer in possession of a gun? Seriously dodgy. I don’t think I could be trusted to even taser anybody without my lenses in. I’d end up zapping the wrong person.
Or it could be the other way round, with a requirement that they wear industrial protective lenses, as many other workplaces do, to reduce the risk of eye injury.
Blimey Mogs, I didn’t know you were a plod. No offence intended.
It’s my side-hustle.🤫🥸
That, at least, is longstanding. When I was a Force Medical Officer back in the 1980s, the regulations allowed recruitment if eyesight could be corrected by “regulation spectacles.” I can’t remember if firearms officers were under the same criteria.
That said, if three police officers came to my rescue in a gang attack, and two were women, and the third shortsighted and of light build, I would not feel that secure.
What i don’t get is why the woman started to try and pull the guy off. She was trying to twist his arm or something. Naturally, unless you’re a martial arts expert, a woman attempting to physically pull an aggressive bloke off their target is never going to end well ( which it didn’t, for her ) and so it does sweet FA. I don’t know what their protocol is in these situations, but if they all possess tasers, shouldn’t she have used that first? If it were me and some psycho was laying into my colleague I’d taser his aggressive arse ( I’d prefer to aim for his bollocks but this guy was standing at the wrong angle ) and disable him in a heartbeat. This situation escalated rapidly and the police seemed seriously ill prepared for this type of incident. As I say, I’m really not sure of the protocol and if officers can go round zapping dirtbags but I wouldn’t hesitate, and in this scenario it would undoubtedly be a case of using proportionate force, because they obviously presented a danger to the officers. Contrast this with that poor 92yr old guy in a nursing home, who… Read more »
Perhaps their hesitancy to use tasers had something to do with the ethnicity of the attackers?
Let’s ban the bespectacled from the police. That should sort it
In fairness, you’d have to be extremely poor sighted to mistake a target at a range suited for a handgun realistically. I assume he has trouble reading at distance, not confusing humans and you’d hope the extensive training given to armed police would give him muscle memory to aim instinctively too (not necessarily using the sights).
That said, you never know when it comes to the police…
I mean, look at the red haired police woman in the first video, she’s completely useless.
Well that’s just female police officers in a situation like this I’m afraid.
I’ve seen many videos of intense police situations, here and in America and I can honestly say that there has never been a useful female officer when it kicked off.
I’m guessing they’re unarmed, otherwise it would make it a free to get weapon.
I wish someone would release this video in Slow Motion, so everything could be seen clearly, stopped and analyzed, like they did with the video of the Evil Matt Petgrave’s racist murder of Adam Johnson.
And yet I sympathise over the glasses. Before my cataract operations I was very short sighted without glasses – but modern glasses are lighter and tend to fit better meaning they rarely get knocked off. I expect that if the firearms officer had to use his weapon the assumption is that the target would be some distance away and unable to snatch the glasses off.
In any event if you look around you many more people now wear glasses and it would limit the number of potential recruits significantly if people wearing glasses were excluded.
My thoughts exactly. That officer has no business being armed, he’s a threat to himself and the public and the chief of police has some pertinent questions to answer. In fact the chief is a bloody muppet.
If I had assaulted police officers in this manner a year ago I would already be 12 months into a long sentence!
There are so many questions from this incident.
Why was a police officer who cannot see beyond the end of his arm given a taser but not glasses that stay on his head during an incident.
Who did it and why was an edited short video showing only blows from the police made public
Why were the police and DPP so hesitant about bringing charges.
Why is the mother not also under arrest
Why can an officer not admit that when repeatedly attacked it is normal for a man to react more vigorously than otherwise – it is normal.
With this evidence why has the case taken so long to come to court
For such repeated violent behaviour why will these men not get a multiple of the sentence given to a blogger.
Could it be that taser are not designed to be used in close combat. You need a cattle prod for close work.
Yes, and why were they bailed, running free all this time, while Lucy Connolly was denied bail and held in Coercive Remand to make her plead “Guilty”? “In the most crucial part of the exposé, Connolly says she was influenced to plead guilty as a result of being held on remand. Behind bars, struggling to speak to a solicitor and with a trial date potentially months away, Lucy became panicked and demoralised. ‘A guilty plea looked like the fastest way to put this nightmare behind her’, explains Pearson. She pleaded guilty in the knowledge she would get a discount on her sentence, expecting to be out by Christmas.” “But judges were refusing almost all bail applications connected to Southport, following explicit political direction from the top. Early in the disorder, a flinty-faced Sir Keir Starmer had told the nation: ‘The police will be making arrests. Individuals will be held on remand. Charges will follow. And convictions will follow.’ “Politics also came to influence the justice system through the widely repeated claim that the unrest had been caused principally by disinformation on social media – ‘whipped up online’, in Starmer’s words. This claim has always been dubious at best, there being… Read more »
“meaning he could not see clearly more than an arm’s length in front of his face due to his short-sightedness.”
The officer was not short-sighted and assuming he wasn’t partially blind he must have been long-sighted.
I disagree – I’m more than averagely short-sighted (-5.5 prescription) and struggle to see much more than the end of my arm clearly (I can’t see this text on the screen at the end of my arm without glasses). At my last eye test I was prescribed varifocals to assist with reading. “Short” and “long” refer to where the eye’s lens focuses light within the eye and not how it affects vision. Short-sighted people need assistance to see things at a distance and long-sighted people to see things close to them.
As others have commented the mother should also be in the dock.
I cannot envisage a sentence of less than ten years apiece for these feral thugs followed by deportation.
I am not an optimist.
Why were they bailed?
Black innit.
Deported to where? Rochdale?
Afghanistan.
Where do you think you live? When a white middle class woman gets 31 months for a tweet, but a torturing pedophile rapist serves less than that, you ought to know that even if these men receive a 10 year sentence they will be out in under 4.
You just have to belong to the right group
Any arrests yet? Or is it only mean tweets that gets you sent to jail?
We know what we saw. We know who the guilty are. They should be deported.
No doubt the judge will give these contemptibles a community sentence or a suspended sentence
Pour encourage l’autres.
The most useful thing the female police officers could have done was to haul off that Evil Muslim Mother who caused it all, interfering with the police officers the entire time, getting in everyone’s way, like a Swaying Lump of Soggy Pudding.
She’s the one who should have been arrested, handcuffed and dragged away, along with her evil, hideous sons.
I did have to laugh at your descriptive “swaying lump of soggy pudding”!🤣😂🍮
🙂
Just as well I’m not a firearms officer
What a shame that police could not use their firearms in that situation.
Why not link the actual video?