Vol. 81/No. 5 February 6, 2017
UK: Hundreds protest against cop killing of Yassar Yaqub
AND TONY HUNT
Dozens of young people mainly from Pakistani families joined the Jan. 9 action, wearing sweatshirts saying, “No justice, no humanity, no peace” and “No chance to surrender, no warning shots, unlawful killing.”
At 6 p.m. Jan. 2, Yaqub was traveling in a car that was boxed in suddenly by unmarked West Yorkshire Police cars in a “hard stop.” The cops didn’t wear body cameras, so there is no recording of what transpired. Photographs showed three bullet holes in the windscreen of Yaqub’s car.
“We are protesting because we’re determined to get justice, at least we can try to stop this from happening again,” Mohammed Rizwan, a protest organizer, told Pete Clifford, Communist League candidate for Greater Manchester mayor, at the Jan. 9 action. “We don’t know exactly what happened, but they didn’t have to kill him.”
“The police should be prosecuted for this crime,” Clifford said, “so they’ll think twice next time before carrying out a hard stop and killing somebody.”
An official inquest into the death opened in Bradford, establishing that Yaqub died from gunshot wounds to his chest. The police say a firearm was found in the car.
The big-business newspapers have been using this claim, and the fact he was charged in 2010 with attempted murder, for which he was acquitted, to launch a smear campaign, alleging he was a “drugs kingpin.”
Mohammed Yaqub, Yassar’s father, answered the attacks on his son. “He hasn’t got a bad past, because he’s never been convicted of anything,” he told a BBC reporter, “I want answers, full answers, nothing but the truth. How can you kill someone like this, at a time like this, without giving him a chance to get out or anything?”
Clifford and other Communist League members campaigned in working-class neighborhoods in the area before the protest, discussing the deepening crisis of the capitalist system worldwide and the need to build a working-class party to lead the fight for workers power.
The capitalist rulers increasingly fear working people will respond to the grinding depression conditions they face, League members said, and the police are beginning to use more heavy-handed methods to try and keep the working class in line.
“If they had some prior knowledge about criminal activities they could have arrested him in a different situation,” Andy Ammon, a self-employed plumber, told Clifford. “It doesn’t matter whether he is a drug dealer or not, like any other human being he deserves a fair trial. I think it is easier to slander him because he is Asian and a Muslim, racism plays a role in this.”
“The killing was wrong. Why didn’t they arrest him and let a jury decide whether or not he was guilty of a crime?” Mohammed Afzil, an engineering factory worker, told Clifford.
“We have to challenge the way the cops act as judge, jury and executioner, and then spread smears to justify it,” Clifford said. “This is similar to the hard stop used against Mark Duggan in London in 2011 and by Greater Manchester police in 2012 that resulted in them killing Anthony Grainger. It’s an assault on the rights all workers have won, on the presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.”
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