debtFor Muslims, weekly prayers are often seen as the most important event of the week, but in Rochdale last week it was even more important than usual – three days after a video that shocked the world left many fearing the town was on the brink of serious unrest.
The footage shows police responding to a report of an assault at Manchester Airport and an armed officer with a Taser gun forcefully kicking the man in the head while he was already unconscious and lying face-down on the ground, before stamping on his head and kneeing him hard in the side, eliciting screams from bystanders.
The short video sparked widespread outrage and quickly spread around the world, being featured on Al Jazeera, CNN and New Zealand’s 1News. Within 48 hours, activists like George Galloway and Tommy Robinson had shared it with their hundreds of thousands of followers.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK added fuel to the fire when Lee Anderson, the party’s MP for Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, said he would award medals to police officers currently facing criminal charges for assault.
In Rochdale, the hometown of Mohammed Fahil, the 19-year-old who was injured by police, there were fears that two nights of protests and frenzied social media frenzy would spread to wider unrest.
“Certainly there were fears that tensions might explode at some point, there’s no hiding that,” said Neil Emmott, leader of Rochdale Borough Council.
In recent years, the controversial town of Rochdale has seen a relatively new phenomenon in which highly localised incidents, often captured on social media, have become the centre of a harmful campaign by online extremists, fuelling anger locally.
This follows a pattern of incidents at a grammar school in Batley, where a teacher was forced into hiding after reports that cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad had been shown to pupils, and at another West Yorkshire school, Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) falsely claimed that a Syrian male pupil had “attacked a young British girl”. Both incidents led to demonstrations outside the schools.
This weekend, authorities were on high alert for planned protests at Manchester Airport after leaflets reading “Planes will not take off” were circulated online.
Fahil’s family called on protesters to leave on Friday night. In a statement on social media, the family asked people to “refrain from taking part in the planned demonstration at Manchester Airport this weekend”, adding that they “do not want to cause any inconvenience to anyone as a result”.
They also called for no further protests, stressing the importance of giving them time to heal and allowing due process to play out.
Imams in Rochdale said they had been “inundated” with “concern, anger, anxiety and frustration” over the footage.
Muslim community leaders have held a series of emergency meetings with police chiefs and leading politicians, including a “Gold Command” meeting at Greater Manchester Police (GMP) headquarters on Thursday night, where leaders sought to prevent tensions being escalated by, in the words of one senior police officer, “bad actors” who have no connection to the Pennine town.
After Friday prayers, the imams issued a statement saying they “totally condemn the horrific acts” by GMP officers. It was seen as an important call for calm and they assured followers they had received a promise that “a full and proper investigation will be carried out, with the cooperation of the local community”. They added: “We call for absolute and swift justice for this family and Dua [a prayer of invocation] I hope this never happens again.”
The most important interventions took place away from the attention of television cameras and social media.
At Castlemere Community Centre, one of the most deprived areas in England, around 40 leading members of Rochdale’s Muslim community met on Friday with leading politicians including Mr Emmott, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, Deputy Mayor Kate Green and Rochdale Borough Council chief executive Steve Rumbelow to try to ease the pressure.
While many in the room wanted peace, one observer said there were “agitators” present, described as allies of Galloway, who met with Fahil’s family on Friday.
After newsletter promotion
At the very moment that the town’s administrative leaders were trying to calm the situation, Ahmed Yaqoob, a lawyer claiming to represent the family, launched into a fiery argument.
In an interview At L.B.C.He called the officers’ actions an “attempted assassination” and said Mr Fahil’s brother, believed to be a serving GMP constable, “was terrified that there would be an assassination attempt if he went to work”.
He had previously said Fahil’s “life is in danger” as he walked into an ambulance and claimed a CT scan had found a cyst on his brain. “Please don’t let him die from brain damage,” he said.
Mr Yaqoob, who ran unsuccessfully as an independent in this year’s general election and in the West Midlands mayoral election, is no stranger to controversy.
He is under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Falsely accuse a teacher of being a racist.
The 36-year-old, who has 200,000 followers on TikTok and posts frequent updates about Fahil’s case, apologized in June after being criticized for saying on a podcast that “70% of hell is women” and for failing to call out a guest who said he would “cheat” on his wife if she made money from dancing on TikTok.
Mr Burnham and newly elected Rochdale MP Paul Waugh have sought to reverse this narrative by highlighting the family’s appeal for calm.
One senior official expressed concern that Mr Yaxley-Lennon was using the incident to promote his own rally in London on Saturday, which he has billed as “the greatest patriotic show of force this country has ever seen”.
The co-founder of the English Defence League told 692,000 supporters that authorities in Rochdale had been “intimidated” by “Muslim mobs” protesting outside the town’s police station, and called on people “fed up with another week of imported crime and riots” to march with him in the capital.
Meanwhile in Rochdale, leaders were hoping for calm, with Mr Emmott saying he was “worried to see people using this disturbing incident for their own nefarious purposes”.
“There’s still some unrest, but it’s fair to say there’s a determination in the community not to let this escalate,” he added.
