Female Police Officer Who Had Nose Broken In Manchester Airport Brawl Speaks Out In First Interview

ByMF Jones

The female police officer who was punched in the face by Mohammed Fahir Amaaz during the infamous Manchester Airport brawl in July 2024 has given her first public interview on the incident.

PC Lydia Ward, who has since been promoted to Sergeant, needed surgery to fix her broken nose, but she believes it no longer looks like it used to, and also sports a small scar that she says will ‘forever remind her’ of what happened that day.

Here’s a reminder of the incident, in which Amaaz broke Ward’s nose and injured fellow officer Ellie Cook’s jaw, after police responded to reports of someone being headbutted at Starbucks in Terminal 2:

Ward has now described how the punch caused her to black out, before she then came to in a ‘state of panic and so much pain’…

Ward has now spoken out about her frustration with the online narratives after initial footage of a male officer kicking Amaaz in the head went viral (after he had assaulted the female officers, mind you). The fact that clip went viral first allowed Amaaz to appear like the victim and allegations of police brutality to be made against the officers.

Ward also claims members of the public at the scene itself were ‘hostile’ towards the police during the incident.

She told The Times: “There were two men shouting and being aggressive. People were filming us. Laughing at us. There was a lot of noise going on. One of the men said something, laughing and being abusive.

“I thought they were all one group at the time but apparently they weren’t. It felt like we’d been ambushed. This felt like an ambush and very anti-police, very much against us.”

5’2 Ward added: “I felt silenced [after the assault]. I saw so much stuff on social media. People making videos giving their opinions on it, people commenting and calling it racist and police brutality.

“I thought: ‘That’s not the full story. I’m the one lying in bed on my back with a broken nose, barely able to breathe, watching all this stuff making out we were the bad guys’.”

She was also left ‘really upset’ after seeing comments online calling her ‘useless’ after nine years of working as a police officer.

She said: “I’d done the job I was sent to do, no matter what people said on social media.”

Amaaz was jailed this week for 3 years and 6 months over the assault. Which seems rather light, but par for the course at this point. Can you imagine if he’d beaten up a bunch of police officers in certain other countries? The guy would never be seeing daylight again.

Well anyway, congrats to PC Ward on making Sergeant and fair play to her for finally getting the chance to speak publicly on the whole thing. It’s good to see that the experience didn’t put her off policing, but unfortunately it had a more negative effect on her colleague PC Cook, who has since put her dreams of becoming a close protection officer on hold.

Onwards and upwards for everyone involved. Well, except maybe Mohammed Fahir Amaaz.

For the police officer who shot a teenager eating McDonald’s in his car for no good reason at all, click HERE.

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