Mohammed Fahir Amaaz was sentenced today (Image: GMP/PA)
A man who assaulted two female police officers as they tried to detain him for headbutting a man in a Starbucks cafe at Manchester Airport has been jailed. Mohammed Fahir Amaaz was sentenced today after being convicted of assaulting a member of the public and two female officers during an incident at Manchester Airport on July 23, 2024.
The man, 21, from Rochdale, has been jailed at Liverpool Crown Court for three-and-a-half years. He had been found guilty in July 2025 of assaulting the member of the public by beating; assaulting PC Ward, occasioning her actual bodily harm; and assaulting an emergency worker, PC Cook, by beating.
During the sentencing hearing, one of the female officers he had assaulted labelled the attack “cowardly”.
The court had previously heard how PC Ward suffered a broken nose, as police bodycam footage showed her bloodied and sobbing, while Amaaz knocked PC Cook to the ground with a series of elbows and punches during the attack.
Ms Ward, now a police sergeant, entered the witness box at Liverpool Crown Court on Friday to read out her victim personal statement as Amaaz watched on videolink from prison, where he has been on remand for the past 11 months.
She said: “I want you to take a good look at me. 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.
“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. What you did was cowardly.”
In her statement read to the court, Sgt Ward said she had been left with a small scar on her nose which would “forever remind me of what you did”.
The officers had responded to reports that a male fitting Amaaz’s description had headbutted a member of the public at a cafe in the airport.
Prosecutors said Amaaz resisted their attempts to take him outside and he went on to use a “high level of violence”.
In her victim impact statement, read by prosecutor Paul Greaney KC, PC Cook said her life “changed forever” on the day of the incident at the airport.
Part of her statement read: “On 23rd July 2024 my life changed forever. I woke up that morning happy. I had recently started a new role at the airport as a firearms officer and I was loving it. I was in the process of getting to know the team and I enjoyed the work we were doing.
“I hadn’t always wanted to be a police officer. I initially wanted to be a physiotherapist but one day I was talking to a family friend who was in the police. She told me I was made for the job, and something clicked inside of me, and I began to think it was the right path for me.
“I know it’s cliché, but I did genuinely join the police to help. I wanted to be able to make a difference in someone’s life. I joined the police in 2018. My aim was to go down the close protection route and to eventually transfer to the Met Police. This was my dream. I needed to become a firearms officer to get on the close protection course and so this is what I did.
“When I woke up on the morning of 23rd July 2024, I never could have imagined what was about to happen to me. I don’t think you will ever begin to understand what you have done to me, or my family. I used to be happy. I used to be driven. I used to be focused. I am now broken.”