Manchester Airport attacker jailed 3.5 years after punching officer Lydia Ward

Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, 21, was sentenced to three-and-a-half years for assaulting two GMP officers at Manchester Airport in July 2024. PC Lydia Ward called him "cowardly" in a powerful victim impact statement.

Manchester Airport assault: officer tells attacker "you are not a victim"

Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, 21, has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison at Liverpool Crown Court after being convicted of assaulting PC Lydia Ward — breaking her nose — during an incident at Manchester Airport in July 2024, the Daily Express reports.

Ward addressed Amaaz directly in her victim impact statement, delivered as he watched via videolink from the prison where he has been held on remand for the past 11 months.

"I want you to take a good look at me," she told him. "Take away that I am a police officer. Look at me, standing here. What do you see? I'll tell you what you see. You see a female. A female who is 5ft2 and at the time of the incident I weighed no more than eight stone."

She continued: "You are a male and you chose to attack me without a second thought. You chose to attack a female. You knocked me to the ground with one punch, with so much force you broke my nose."

Bodycam footage of the incident, which circulated widely on social media, showed Ward bloodied and sobbing after the attack. The footage also captured Amaaz knocking a second officer, PC Ellie Cook, to the ground with elbows and punches.

Ward described her anger at Amaaz's conduct in the weeks that followed: "What angers me is that afterwards, when only part of the footage was out in the public, you played the victim. You are not a victim. I am the one who was injured, not you."

She said he had shown no remorse despite having "the whole world listening" to him. "You allowed the public to feel sorry for you. You made out like we had done something wrong when all we were doing was our job."

Ward, who has since been promoted to sergeant, said the abuse directed at her on social media had been "disgusting" and that Amaaz could have corrected public perception by telling the truth. "Instead, you continued with this narrative, even when the full footage was published."

She added that a small scar on her nose would "forever remind me of what you did."

Beyond the attack on the two officers, Amaaz was also convicted of an earlier assault on a member of the public at a nearby Starbucks café. Officers had been called to reports that a man matching Amaaz's description had headbutted a customer, Abdulkareem Ismaeil, minutes before the airport confrontation on 23 July 2024. Prosecutors told the court that Amaaz resisted efforts to remove him from the area and used a "high level of violence."

In December 2024, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that no police officer would face charges in connection with the incident, a decision that led Greater Manchester Police to lift the suspension of PC Marsden from all duties. An investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct into allegations that Marsden and a second officer used excessive force remains ongoing. PC Ward and PC Cook were treated as witnesses only in that inquiry.

Source: Daily Express