Crying racism

The controversial ‘racist’ incident at Manchester Airport, where a policeman was recorded kicking a Pakistani-origin passenger in the head, has taken a dramatic turn, as new footage shows that while the kick was undeserved, the passenger was by no means angel. CCTV footage and eyewitness recordings paint a very different story to the unprovoked assault on Fahir Amas that the original clips suggest.

The incident appears to have started after an altercation between Fahir’s mother and another passenger. The victim’s family claims the other passenger used racist language, though this has not been independently confirmed. The victim and his brother Amaad Khan then got involved in the altercation, which is when police intervened to separate the group, and the brothers began attacking the cops, including at least two policewomen. Amaad was thrashing a policeman as his mother tried to stop him, and only stopped to surrender after realising he had accidentally elbowed his mother in the face and knocked her to the ground. The same policeman then unnecessarily pointed his taser at Amaad when Fahir — who was punching both policewomen, knocking them to the ground and breaking one’s nose — started attacking the policeman. A policewoman then tasered Fahir to the ground. At this point, the ‘original’ short clip begins, as the policeman, who had been beaten up by both brothers, takes a cheap shot and kicks Fahir in the face. The same cop also then needlessly kicked Amaad’s thigh and hit him with the butt of a taser.

Unsurprisingly, soon after the CCTV and other longer videos were released, the brothers’ family put out a statement of concern for the health of the injured police officials — as if they did not know they broke a woman’s nose — and their lawyer shifted gears from racism and assassination accusations to a simple excessive force claim. While the kicking cop has been suspended and still deserves to lose his job for unprofessional conduct, the attempts to portray the police’s actions as racially motivated or an “assassination” attempt, as claimed by the brothers’ lawyer, shows how the ‘race card’ is abused to the detriment of actual victims of racism.