What REALLY occurred at Manchester airport that led to indignant protests

A young Asian man wearing a turquoise top and shorts lies face down on the concrete floor of a multi-storey car park next to Manchester Airport‘s Terminal 2.

His hands are by his side and a middle-aged woman crouches over him, seemingly in a state of enormous distress. Next to them stand two police officers, one male, the other female. They are both wearing full protective gear, brandishing Taser guns and shouting. At least one of their yellow devices has incapacitated the man.

What happens in the next few seconds will reverberate around the UK for days, sparking angry protests in Rochdale and Manchester, and placing British policing at the centre of a George Floyd-style debate about institutional racism.

Yet viral news events are rarely straightforward. In the days that follow, there turns out to be far more to this shocking incident than first appears. What had at first seemed like an unprovoked police assault had in fact come seconds after a violent confrontation, during which the young Asian man swung punches at a group of police officers, several of them female, knocking at least one woman to the ground.

As to the outpouring of righteous public anger that followed the incident, it was stoked by opportunistic politicians and campaigners, many issuing highly partial and provocative statements. Throwing petrol on the flames was a controversial TikTok lawyer with an insatiable appetite for self-publicity, who decided to publicly accuse the police of attempting to carry out a racially motivated killing.

So what really lay behind the so-called ‘Manchester Airport incident’? Who was to blame? And what can we learn?

A video goes viral

The original mobile phone clip was posted online at around 2pm on Wednesday, July 24. Lasting 44 seconds, it begins by showing the male police officer step towards the Asian man and kick him in the face. He then stomps with his heel on the man’s skull.

Chaos ensues, with panicked onlookers swearing and shouting, and several other police officers screaming ‘move back’, brandishing Tasers, and pulling bystanders out of the way. Police then approach a second Asian man, who is sitting on a chair in a pair of black shorts and a T-shirt, and scream ‘get down… get down!’ He is kicked in the thigh, dragged to the floor, punched in the back of the neck and handcuffed.

As two officers kneel on the back of the man in turquoise, the middle-aged woman staggers away. There are spots of blood all over the floor, next to discarded flip-flops and pieces of luggage.

As members of the public — whose involvement in the altercation isn’t clear — scream ‘stop kicking him’ and ‘you’re on camera,’ visibly flustered police officers fire pepper spray at them.

By 2.30pm, versions of the video are being uploaded to X (formerly Twitter) and at 4.07pm, the Manchester Evening News publishes a news article about the incident, including a comment from Greater Manchester Police (GMP).

It states that four men had been arrested, while three officers had been injured during the confrontation, including a female officer ‘who suffered a broken nose’.

Politicians weigh in

It takes only a couple of hours for politicians and commentators to begin issuing often portentous statements. Despite having no detailed knowledge of events preceding those depicted in the short clip, many instantly characterise the incident as one of police brutality.

Afzal Khan, the Labour MP for Manchester Rusholme who has held Shadow Cabinet roles, said: ‘I am aware of an incident at Manchester Airport where officers appear to use excessive force against an unarmed civilian,’ and urged the force to refer itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).

Adnan Hussain, the Independent MP for Blackburn, declared himself ‘deeply concerned with what can only be described as a complete abuse of power’.

Dame Vera Baird, a former Labour MP who served as Gordon Brown’s Solicitor General and was a Police and Crime Commissioner and Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, used a radio interview to complain that the clip shows the officer ‘kicking the man’s head like a football’ and concluding that there was ‘very little excuse’ for his behaviour.

Across the political divide, Reform MP Lee Anderson goes in to bat for the cops. ‘The vast majority of British people would applaud this style of policing,’ he claims. ‘We are sick of the namby-pamby approach. Time to back our boys in blue.’

Two nights of protests

By 9PM the GMP divisional HQ in Rochdale, where the two Asian men reportedly come from, is surrounded by angry protesters.

Some members of the 200-strong crowd, many wearing face coverings, shout ‘shame on you’ while others let off fireworks or chant ‘Allahu Akbar’. Fuelling public anger are several other mobile phone videos of the airport incident. 

One shows a police officer pointing a Taser at three men as someone behind the camera shouts: ‘We have not done nothing, we are just recording.’ Another depicts a man in a grey T-shirt being pepper-sprayed in the face and wrestled to the ground by one officer while another screams: ‘You’re going to get locked up!’

The next day, Thursday, July 25, sees a demonstration in Manchester city centre, where protesters block tram lines and roads and brandish Black Lives Matter placards. Stoking fears of mob rule, Jack Khan, a former Labour councillor who stood unsuccessfully for the Workers Party in Bolton at the general election over Gaza, declares that there will be ‘big protests like you have never seen before’ unless the officers involved are arrested ‘immediately’.

Such demands meet with a remarkably conciliatory response. Leaders of the protest are invited for meetings with the mayor, MPs and police chiefs, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer says, ‘I understand the public’s concern,’ and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper expresses ‘deep concern’ and urges ‘swift investigation’.

Crucial details come out

A lone voice of sanity, amid the political point-scoring, is Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, a close ally of Stephen Watson, the city’s police chief whose ‘back to basics’ approach has been credited for dramatically reducing crime.

On July 25, Burnham gives a series of interviews arguing that there’s more to the incident than initially meets the eye, saying: ‘I would say it’s a fast-moving and complicated situation in a challenging location . . . there are issues for both sides.’

By now, the two men have been identified. Confusingly, they use different surnames but appear to be brothers. The man in turquoise is Fahir Amaaz, 19. The individual in black shorts was his elder sibling Muhammad Amaad, 25.

They’d travelled to the airport to meet their 56-year-old mother, Shameem Akhtar, who was returning to the UK after an extended stay in Pakistan. She is the distressed woman in the video.

Police statements and family sources reveal that there had been an ‘altercation’ between Shameem and another passenger during the journey, on flight QR023 from Doha, which landed at 7.20pm on Tuesday July 23. This continued in the baggage hall, where the other passenger, a man, is alleged to have jostled her with a luggage trolley and made racist remarks.

When Shameem was reunited with her sons, she told them about the incidents. They responded by tracking down the man, in the terminal’s Starbucks. There followed a violent confrontation in which a customer was headbutted at around 8.22pm. This incident was observed by airport police, who were watching on CCTV.

They had followed the brothers to the car park and attempted to apprehend them at a payment machine at 8.28pm.

Enter the TikTok lawyer

Not long after Burnham’s interview, Akhmed Yakoob, a director at Maurice Andrews Solicitors in Birmingham, used TikTok to share a video of himself sitting alongside the brothers.

They had just been released from Cheadle police station, with the help of an associate who had taken footage of their injuries.

A video of them travelling home in a car was also uploaded to the video-sharing site with commentary criticising the ‘f****** dirty pigs’. Yakoob did not mince his words. 

A well-known internet personality — who drives a yellow Lamborghini and posts videos of himself wearing Prada trainers and a glittering diamond watch — he gave a series of interviews, claiming at various times that his new clients had been victims of an ‘attempted joint enterprise assassination’. ‘I don’t like to play the race card, but it’s clear South Asian men have been targeted by the police, particularly men of Pakistani heritage,’ he added.

In other words, with protesters on the streets and tensions running high, the family’s lawyer was publicly accusing the police of attempting to kill his clients because of their ethnicity.

Yakoob describes himself as ‘the best defence lawyer in the UK’ and has the slogan: ‘There is a defence for every offence!’

He said the brothers have an elder sibling who is a serving police officer and that he was now ‘afraid an assassination attempt on his life might take place if he goes to work’. It’s quite the conspiracy theory.

Critics swiftly accused Yakoob of trying to stoke sectarian conflict. Chris Phillips, former head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, took to TV to say: ‘This man is a race grifter [a person who encourages racial division for their own agenda]. If he is a solicitor, he knows very little about the law.’

A mysterious head injury

During further interviews, Yakoob suggested that Fahir had suffered a serious injury during the incident, alleging that he’d been to hospital where a CT scan had revealed a ‘cyst on the brain’.

This baffled medical experts, since a cyst is a fluid-filled sac usually present from birth as part of a congenital condition. They can be either benign or cancerous and often require surgery in later life. In rare instances, they can also be caused by head injuries, although this variety is not regarded as serious and doesn’t usually require treatment.

Be that as it may, Yakoob told reporters: ‘I’ve documented their injuries and we are headed to Rochdale police station to make a formal complaint of assault and wounding against the officers.’

The solicitor went on to shed more light on the background of the brothers, whose family home is a red-brick detached property in Smallbridge, a suburb on the north-eastern outskirts of Rochdale, which their 55-year-old father Rabnawaz Khan purchased for £245,000 in August 2006.

He characterised them as devout young men who are well known in Rochdale for their volunteer work for local Islamic charities.

‘One thing I can say loud and clear is that nothing justifies the barbaric treatment from the police officers,’ he added.

‘Because as you can see from the videos that everybody has seen there was no threat whatsoever to the police or the public.’

The second video drops

By last Saturday, the police officer filmed kicking Fahir in the head had been suspended and told that he faced possible criminal charges, while the Left-leaning Twitterati continued to work themselves into a lather about alleged police brutality.

George Galloway had now appeared on the scene, revealing he was in contact with the family over the incident in which they had been ‘savagely assaulted’.

Then came a fresh bombshell in the shape of a leaked security video that, for the first time, revealed what had happened in the 30 seconds leading up to the moment when a policeman’s boot came into contact with Fahir.

It offered a fresh, and some might say dramatically different, take on proceedings.

The CCTV footage begins with three officers attempting to arrest Fahir as he used a car park ticket machine. Rather than follow their instructions, he resists, at which point Muhammad throws a barrage of at least six punches at a male officer, who falls onto a row of metal seats next to a vending machine. 

Fahir then lashes out, punching one female officer in the temple and another clean in the face, knocking her off her feet and leaving her sprawled on the floor, with blood seeming to spurt from her broken nose.

The 19-year-old then turns his attention to the male officer, who has staggered to his feet and aimed a Taser at Muhammad.

Fahir punches him in the head before grabbing him around the neck from behind and attempting to choke him.

His attack only ends when one of the female officers drags herself off the floor and fires a second Taser round, knocking him over. As he hits the ground, he releases the armed officer from his chokehold. The film ends at the moment the male officer kicks Fahir in the head, between three and four seconds later.

What will happen next?

The new footage brought a halt to protests and sparked a more informed debate about whether the use of force was justified.

Commentators backing the police argued that Fahir and Muhammad had reacted to the attempted arrest in a violent and frenzied manner that made it entirely possible that they were terrorists.

Neither was handcuffed and both had shown themselves to be dangerous. There may therefore have been a risk that the armed officers — who were outnumbered by an apparently hostile crowd of onlookers — might have their weapons taken from them.

Critics, meanwhile, continued to insist that, whatever their behaviour, kicking the head of a man lying face down on the floor was excessive.

Elsewhere, serious questions were by now being asked about Yakoob and his track record.

He’d stood as an Independent candidate in the Birmingham Ladywood constituency on a pro-Gaza, anti-Labour platform at the last general election, saying he’d been chosen by Allah to ‘challenge the Zionist regime’.

That had ended in tears, however, after he falsely accused a local teacher of using a racist slur to criticise him while out canvassing. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has launched an investigation.

Yakoob had also been at the centre of controversy for remarks in a 2023 YouTube video in which he said that he ‘rated’ the self-proclaimed ‘misogynist’ influencer Andrew Tate, who was facing charges of rape, human trafficking and sexually exploiting women.

At the start of this week, his relationship with Fahir and Muhammad came to an end. The brothers are now being represented by Aamer Anwar, a high-profile solicitor from Glasgow. Mr Anwar has contacted the Independent Office for Police Conduct with ‘regards to lodging a formal complaint’.

How that pans out — and where this saga eventually leads — will now be a matter for the regulator and the courts.