UK Police Officers to Learn Fate Over Babar Ahmad Beating

Five police officers are to learn today if they will be charged over a racist attack on British Muslim, Babar Ahmad.

One report states,

“Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer is expected to announce whether anyone will face trial over the arrest of British Muslim Babar Ahmad.

Up to five Metropolitan Police officers could be prosecuted over an attack on the 36-year-old as he was held in Tooting, south London, in December 2003.

The officers, all members of the force's controversial territorial support group, have been accused of a "serious, gratuitous and prolonged" attack.

The Met paid £60,000 damages in March last year as lawyers for Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson admitted Ahmad had been the victim of violence. Court documents revealed officers beat and grabbed him around the neck, pulled his testicles and mocked his Islamic faith."

The “Free Babar Ahmad” website details the story,

“Babar Ahmad was first arrested at his Tooting home on 02 December 2003 by UK anti-terrorist police of 1 Unit 1 Area Territorial Support Group based at Paddington Green high-security police station. By the time he arrived in the custody suite of the police station, he had sustained at least 73 injuries, all later documented by both police and independent doctors, as well as in photographic and video evidence.

He filed a formal complaint that was supervised by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). He complained that officers had beaten him with fists and knees, stamped on his bare feet with boots, rubbed metal handcuffs on his forearm bones, sexually abused him, mocked the Islamic faith by placing him into the Muslim prayer position and taunting, ‘Where is your God now?!’, and applied life-threatening neck holds to him until he felt he was about to die.”

Mr. Ahmad has been in prison without trial for six years since the US issued an extradition warrant in August 2004.

In July 2010, the European Court of Human rights ordered a halt for the time being to his extradition order and the order of three other men. The court ruled that the men were “at real risk” of being held in a US “super max” prison for life, if convicted. The Court said that the men’s cases “raised serious questions of fact and law which were of such complexity that the Court had to examine them on the merits”.

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