Dr Rashid Abbasi lost a civil claim for false imprisonment and assault and battery against Northumbria Police after he was forcibly removed from his dying daughter’s hospital bedside
The dad who was forcibly removed from his dying daughter’s hospital bedside by police is facing a huge legal bill after losing his case for wrongful arrest. Dr Rashid Abbasi also brought a civil claim for false imprisonment and assault and battery against Northumbria Police but was condemned as dishonest by a judge.
Now, he will have to pay for the five-day trial at Newcastle crown court in his civil case and around 60 to 70 per cent of the legal costs of Northumbria Police, a bill estimated at anywhere from £50,000 up to £100,000. Disturbing video images showed him shouting ‘b*******’ and biting officers who restrained and dragged him from intensive care in August 2019.
He now faces paying not only his own legal costs but the costs of Northumbria Police following a case which took six years to come to court. He had attempted to recover some costs under a one way cost shifting regime but it is understood that police have opposed that move and it is set to be rejected by the judge. It was a bid to offset some of the ‘costs liability’ which will run into tens of thousands of pounds.
Police footage showed Dr Abbasi, 64, sparked the violence in the paediatric unit of the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, said Recorder James Murphy in his judgement.
He condemned his ‘quite appalling’ allegations that an officer had told him that he would never see daughter Zainab again as untrue and said that he doubted even Dr Abbasi had ever believed it.
In his damning judgement, he said: “I would be very surprised that a member of the public let alone a police officer would not have decided there was likely to be a breach of the peace.
“The attitude of Dr Abbasi at the time described by the nurses and also the security guards paint a much more accurate picture of the menace present on the ward used by Dr Abbasi.
“It is perfectly clear to me looking at his demeanour and attitude. If I was a bystander having watched this footage, a reasonable description would have been that Dr Abbasi was a coiled spring.”
He and his wife, Aliya, 57, also a doctor, were told that medics wanted to remove their Zainab, six, from a ventilator keeping her alive. The little girl suffered from a life-limiting neurodegenerative condition called Niemann-Pick Disease.
It was a ‘truly shocking’ incident, the judge said. She died four weeks after it.
Speaking after the case earlier this month, Dr Abbasi said: “My daughter Zainab was the light of my life. “She was a critically ill young girl. She needed both her parents by her bedside. Any father would have been desperate to stay.
“I am disappointed that the arrest was held to be lawful and the description of me by the Judge as a menace was unwarranted and hurtful and is not borne out by the video footage which tells its own story.”
His solicitor, Daniel Cooper, Partner at Imran Khan and Partners, said he would be advising on the merits of an appeal “in due course.”
Both Northumbria Police and Dr Abassi’s legal team declined to comment on the legal bill.
