British police goon

A police officer cleared yesterday of racially assaulting two teenagers had previously been involved in a “serious, gratuitous and prolonged” attack on a Muslim that led to a £60,000 compensation payout by his force.

PC Mark Jones, 42, can now be revealed as a member of the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group (TSG) unit that punched, kicked and stamped on Babar Ahmad during a raid at his southwest London home. So severe was the attack that this year a High Court judge ordered the Met to pay Mr Ahmad’s family £60,000 damages for “gross brutality”.

During Mr Jones’s four-week trial at Kingston Crown Court, on charges of assaulting the teenagers in London in 2007, the judge forbade any mention of Mr Jones’s part in the attack on Mr Ahmad.

The Kingston jury, which unanimously acquitted Mr Jones, was never told that in 2003 the former Royal Marine was part of a group of six officers who seized Mr Ahmad at his house in Tooting and forcefully restrained him as part of the TSG’s controversial “deck and dominate” technique. The officers had been told that Mr Ahmad was running an al-Qaeda cell.

Some of the officers were said to have mocked Mr Ahmad’s faith and forced him into a praying position as one officer said: “Where is your god now? Pray to him.” Some officers beat him, stamped on his toes and another apparently grabbed his testicles.

In the back of the police van Mr Ahmad, a married man who is being held without charge awaiting extradition under terror legislation, was left in fear of his life when he was held in a neck brace and was unable to breathe.

In March the High Court ordered the force to pay damages. The IPCC had earlier found that there was a case to answer for excessive force against Mr Ahmad. However, the CPS did not bring charges against any of the officers, and the Metropolitan Police’s internal disciplinary tribunal concluded in April 2005 that there was no case to answer. The force later admitted that the six officers had been the subject of at least 77 complaints involving black or Asian men since 1992. All but one was unsubstantiated, a force spokesman said at the time.

The jury at Kingston was also not told that Inspector Paul Davis, the officer who gave Mr Jones a glowing character reference in court, was the senior officer who supervised the raid at Mr Ahmad’s home and was said to have witnessed the assaults.

In the Kingston trial the prosecution claimed that Mr Jones subjected two youths to a physical and verbal attack in June 2007, accusing a 16-year-old Kuwaiti of “robbing people while British soldiers are getting killed in Iraq”. In a statement, Mr Ahmad’s family said that they were disappointed with the verdict, and called for Mr Jones to be tried over the attack on Mr Ahmad.

They said that although the Metropolitan Police had admitted the brutality of the attack, no officers had been prosecuted, adding: “This is reflective of a culture that exists in the UK whereby police officers are able to behave as brutally as they wish with full knowledge that they will not be held to account by the authorities.”

Original report here



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