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Nazir Afzal


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THE former Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) chief prosecutor of the North West, Nazir Afzal, who brought down a Rochdale child abuse gang, has suggested Boris Johnson could face prosecution for misconduct in public office over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Afzal’s older brother Umar died of coronavirus in April last year while isolating at home in Birmingham. Weeks later, his mother also passed away.

He said that his brother would not be dead if the government hadn’t stopped community testing on March 12. Later, Afzal also contracted the virus. This experience led him to call for the CPS, the Metropolitan Police and Durham Constabulary to reopen and fully investigate claims that the prime minister’s adviser Dominic Cummings may have broken laws during the pandemic lockdown.

He also offered to meet Boris Johnson on behalf of the families bereaved by the virus.

In January, he said that his family home in Manchester was attacked after he joined a campaign to prosecute Dominic Cummings for alleged lockdown breaches.

Son of Pashtun immigrants from northern Pakistan, Afzal was a former senior prosecutor for London and the chief prosecutor for northwest England until 2015.

He was famous for restarting the prosecutions of the Rochdale Muslim grooming-gangs after the CPS had abandoned the cases – allegedly out of fears over “political correctness”.

One of the UK’s most outspoken lawyers, his hotly-awaited memoir, The Prosecutor, was published in April 2020. It was described by Richard Scorer in the New Law Journal as “an inspiring account of the career of an outstanding public servant”. Writing in The Sunday Times, Rosamund Urwin called it a “fast-paced memoir” which “explores what led him to become a champion of the ignored”.

Born in 1962, Afzal grew up in Small Heath in a two-up two-down terraced house with seven siblings,

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