- Monday, May 06, 2024
By: Pramod Thomas
A former regional chief prosecutor has said that his family home in Manchester was attacked after he joined a campaign to prosecute Dominic Cummings into alleged lockdown breaches.
Nazir Afzal has said that his car was ‘slashed’ outside the home after he announced he had urged the Metropolitan police and Crown Prosecution Service to investigate Cummings’ journeys to Durham and Barnard Castle.
Besides, a brick was thrown through the window of his family home in Manchester, he told The Guardian. Following this he was forced to move house.
“My family felt scared. I don’t blame Dominic Cummings. All I know is that in 25 years prosecuting some of the most organised criminals in the country, nobody has attacked my home. Yet suddenly someone starting attacking me and my family and we’ve had to move house,” he said.
“There’s always a personal cost to standing up [for] what’s right. In 2006, I was on an al-Qaida death list after I prosecuted Danish cartoon protesters, and in 2012 the far right demonstrated outside my house after the Rochdale grooming gang case. I accept that people will attack me personally, but I draw the line when my family is involved.”
According to the report, more than 3,000 people have crowdfunded the campaign to get Cummings prosecuted.
Cummings, who resigned from the government in November 2020 after an internal power struggle, denies his movements during the first lockdown amounted to a breach of the Covid regulations.
In December, Durham police revealed it was assessing a 225-page dossier submitted by Afzal and his lawyers, alleging Cummings breached the lockdown rules multiple times and perverted the course of justice in his account of his movements.
Afzal was a former senior prosecutor for London and the chief prosecutor for north-west England until 2015.
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, the report said.
He said that his brother would not be dead if the government hadn’t stopped community testing on 12 March.
Afzal, who is currently suffering from Covid himself, also offered to meet Boris Johnson on behalf of the families bereaved by the virus.
He said that he would volunteer to act as a US-style special prosecutor to investigate the UK’s response to the Covid crisis, if Johnson agrees.
In April, a paperback version of Afzal’s book The Prosecutor will be published with a new chapter on the death of his brother and the Cummings affair.
