This by Brendan O’Neill in the Daily Mail tonight sums up the result so far of the Manchester Airport trial and the concerns any sensible person has about it. Hat tip Terry.
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.
Lucy Connolly wrote her now-infamous tweet about ‘setting fire’ to migrant hotels on July 29 (after communities erupted in fury over the murder of three little girls at a Taylor Swift dance class,) 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. . . how can a woman (even one who was somehow coerced into pleading guilty) 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?
The brawl took place in the multi-storey car-park of Terminal 2 at Manchester Airport . . . 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’,
Home Secretary Yvette 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.
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.
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. . . 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.
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.
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.
…yes, Amaaz has got the conviction he deserved. But the delays in this case are troubling – and smack of moral cowardice.
The jury couldn’t reach a verdict on the charges of assault on PC Zachary Marsden. He and his brother face a retrial, NEXT YEAR, in April which will be nearly 2 years after the incident. They reason for the delay is, apparently, the unavailability of defence counsel. That wouldn’t have been an acceptable reason in my youth. There are plenty of barristers who could have taken over; they charge a fortune for refreshers anyway. And why is their defence solicitor Aamer Anwar (the dandified Pakistani man always seen between the brothers) a political activist lawyer trained and practising in Scotland, albeit born in Manchester. And not a Mancunian or Liverpool criminal solicitor from the English juristdiction? Scotland runs under a different legal code to England and Wales. The Napoleonic code used by France and based on Roman Law. There’s no law against it, but it is exceedingly odd. The whole situation is very odd indeed.
3 Responses
“This brute, who thinks nothing of punching women in the face.”
“But the woman-punching coward Mohammed has been served with justice.”
“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?”
There is too much emphasis on the fact they were woman officers which there wouldn’t have been if the men officer was attacked. It’s like they are suggesting women officers aren’t cut out for the job which isn’t a good look for feminism and equality!
That said I agree with all the points made.
There is too much emphasis on the fact that the officers attacked were women which suggests they are not good for the job and they arenot equal to the men officer. That said I agree with the points made!
STuff like this leads to a civil war.