THE DEATH OF MOHAMUD MOHAMMED HASSAN ON SATURDAY 9TH JANUARY SPARKED A WAVE OF ANGER AND PROTEST ACROSS CARDIFF, AND GAINED THE ATTENTION OF THE WIDER BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT. ARRESTED THEN RELEASED WITHOUT CHARGE, HE DIED HOURS AFTER LEAVING THE CUSTODY OF SOUTH WALES POLICE WITH BRUISES AND BLOOD STAINED CLOTHES. BUT THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND JUSTICE HAS BEEN MET WITH SILENCE BY MUCH OF THE ESTABLISHMENT IN WALES. SC COOK SPOKE TO PROTESTERS WHO TOOK TO THE STREETS, PEOPLE WHO KNEW MOHAMUD HASSAN AND THOSE WHOSE FAMILIES HAD BEEN TORN APART BY POLICE RACISM AND UNACCOUNTABILITY.
By SC Cook
For four straight days they came, wave after wave of protest, sometimes going into the night, to demand justice for Mohamud Mohammed Hassan.
Standing outside the same police station he had walked away from just days earlier, crowds gathered to tell the barricade of assembled cops that the death of the young, bright man they had known would not be brushed aside as some unexplained tragedy.
Less than 48 hours before the first march took place on Tuesday 12th January, news broke of Mohamud’s shocking death. In a blog post by his family’s legal advocate Lee Jasper on the Sunday evening, it was reported that Mohamud had been violently arrested on Friday, held overnight in Cardiff Bay station and released on Saturday morning with serious injuries. Upon arriving home to his flat on Newport Road, his aunt said he should go to A&E, but exhausted, Mohamud said he just wanted to sleep. When paramedics arrived hours later, they were unable to revive him.
As protesters marched towards the police station on Tuesday afternoon, a woman, pictured below, stood facing the crowd. She held aloft a copy of the day’s South Wales Echo, which had the face of Mohamud Hassan next to the vague headline: Death of Man, 24, Referred to Police Watchdog.
“I’m here because of this boy,” she shouted, pointing at his image. “I knew him very well.” The raw emotion and pain were audible in her voice as she described Mohamed as “well liked” and someone who had “friends everywhere.”
“Have a look, have a look!” she said, pointing to the crowds, when I asked what his death meant to the community. “Everybody’s up in arms. We want answers, the family wants answers.”
In a city that is 15% Black, Asian or minority ethnic (the true figure is likely much higher), and where three Black men were falsely convicted for the murder of a white woman in 1988, sparking a global justice campaign known as the Cardiff 3, the paper understood the significance of Mohamud’s death and the shameful history of police racism it brought to the surface.
It was a realisation that was lost on almost every elected politician in the area, however, who noticeably stayed away from all four protests, not even finding the courage to send a message of solidarity to those marching. With the exception of Neil McAvoy, not a single MS attended over four straight days.
We do not yet know exactly what happened to Mohamud Hassan and what his cause of death was, but the evidence so far is damming of South Wales Police. His Aunt describes him returning from police custody with “lots of wounds on his body and lots of bruises…He didn’t have these wounds when he was arrested and when he came out of Cardiff Bay police station, he had them.”
According to the family’s legal team, the statutory post mortem confirmed that he had blood stains on his jacket, bruising and facial injuries. He was arrested for suspected breach of the peace, a minor offence, and released without charge, yet for this appears to have been subjected to an excessive use of force.
When voice contacted a member of his family on Monday, they directed us to the Go Fund Me page for more details of what had happened. Now on £50,000 that will go towards the campaign’s legal fees, the page makes further claims that Mohamud was tasered twice and that he told people how he had been kicked in the head.
“How did he get arrested and within 24 hours end up dead?”
In the face of all of this, the police have said nothing to explain how Mohamud obtained his injuries, not even acknowledging the testimony of his family who saw him on the Saturday. Instead they’ve stuck to releasing opaque statements that seek to absolve themselves of any blame.
This has only made the sense of injustice and anger even stronger.
“Tell us, how did a boy get taken from his home, how did he get arrested and within 24 hours end up dead? How did this happen, we wanna know!” boomed Nelly Adam, an anti-racist activist in Cardiff on Tuesday.
“Why has this boy got brutality on his body… This is not ‘serve and protect,’ this is police brutality at its finest,” she shouted, gesturing to the cops standing by. “We do not stand for this; we are here today to know why. Show us the footage!”
At this point the crowd erupted with one of the central demands of the protests: for the police to release the body-worn video and CCTV footage relating to Mohamad Hassan’s arrest and detainment.
Apart from the MS Bethan Sayed, who lives in Cardiff, this basic demand for transparency has generally not been echoed by our city’s elected politicians. Neither has the demonstrator’s other appeal: that the officers involved are immediately suspended while the investigation takes place, something that is so common for lesser issues in other workplaces that it is now done as a matter of course.
In fact the lack of urgency with which the Welsh establishment has greeted the shocking death of a 24 year old Black man following an interaction with South Wales Police is telling, and can be contrasted with the mood on the protests, which were dominated by Cardiff’s Black and Asian communities.
Facing Nelly Adam as she laid into the police, her voice wrought with pain and anger like so many of the speakers, were often black and brown women, many wearing a Niqab, who were among the most determined to let the cops know that they weren’t going to get away with this.
One of these young women spoke to me afterwards. “It’s a matter that is really close to my heart, Mohamud was part of our community,” she said.
She pointed to a badge on her coat which read ‘Who Killed Mark Harris?”, the 31 year old Black man from Cardiff, arrested on suspicion of stealing a cheque book in 1994, and who later died in police custody.
“My uncle Mark was murdered in a police cell in Bristol Trinity police station. I was 4 years old when I was on that march,” she said.
“They tried to say he hung himself, but the evidence proved he had a gash to the head.”
She says she witnessed the police break down the door of his mothers’ home when she was a small child, and take key bits of evidence that they would later use for their own testimony in court. “So this is something I am used to, and it has become normal, but it is not the norm.”
The spectre of police racism was clear to anyone who bothered to listen: among the overwhelmingly Black and Brown crowd, people spoke freely about their own experience and knowledge of the issue. But the grim familiarity which met yet another story of a Black life disregarded by the authorities could not take away from the raw anger felt by those attending and their demands for justice.
“These police need to be sorted out,” said Layla, who knew Mohamud and described him as a ‘lovely boy.’ “You think you can turn to the police for help, but it goes to show,” she said. Her daughter, in her mid-teens and standing by, was more damning:
“The police are murderers,” she says. “That’s why we’re here, police don’t like Black people, sad to say it but they don’t, they’re racist.”
Another person standing nearby, Ahmed, who was friends with Mohamud, explained how he felt endangered by the police and described what it was like to be a young Black man in Cardiff.
“I get scared every single time they stop me,” he says. “I seen people get beat up every day by the police…it’s not fair because they treat us different. They see a group of Black friends, like I was walking with two of my friends or three of my friends and they will just pull us up and say you’re a drug dealer.”
Ahmed says that no matter where they are, they’re told that it’s an area with a drug problem, and this is used as an excuse to search them.
“I could be in Butetown, I could be in Llanedeyrn, I could be in Tremorfa, I could be anywhere. They’re telling me: ‘you’re a drug dealer, you’re in a drug dealing area.’”
He describes his friend as a funny guy, and says he never thought that something like this could happen in Cardiff, especially after what he says was the hope delivered by the Black Lives Matter movement last year.
“The police can’t really get away with this. So we need to do something about it. And this is the only way they’re gonna listen, we can’t just leave and let the guy die and forget about him.” Protest, Tuesday 12th January. Photo, SC CookFamily Protesting. Photo, SC Cook
South Wales police have sought to dispel this mood for swift answers with a promise that they have sent all ‘relevant’ footage to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, who are investigating the issue.
The IOPC released a statement shortly after stating that the investigation would take a long time but saw fit to include a line stating that there was “no physical trauma injury to explain a cause of death.”
This was then repeated by the former Labour MP and Police and Crime Commissioner Alun Michael, while the Cardiff Chief Constable said the matter had been referred to the IOPC as a matter of course, and “not because we thought that police officers had done anything wrong.”
Several politicians, including MP Steven Doughty, whose constituency the protests were held in, have pushed the line that people should let the IOPC do its work.
But Lee Jasper, who is representing the family, has fiercely contested these statements.
“Not only had the Chief Constable concluded within hours of Mohamud’s death that his officers had done nothing wrong, but the IOPC had also reported some 48 hours later, that there was “no physical trauma” suffered by Mohamud that could explain the cause of death,” he wrote. “This in spite of the fact that they had sight of the interim post-mortem examination report that confirmed Mohamad’s body was battered and bruised.”
The choice to release only selected information, which would be reprinted by the press without caveat, looked like the first moves in a PR campaign rather than an attempt to give people the truth. There has yet been no attempt to explain how Mohamud obtained his injuries.
The IOPC and the “faux system of ‘accountability.”
Going on its record alone, it’s no wonder that so many people have little faith in the IOPC. As Dylan Moore from the Institute of Welsh Affairs pointed out in a recent article, there have been 1774deaths in police custody, or following contact with the police in England & Wales since 1990, yet in that time not a single police officer has been convicted for the death of someone in custody.
The IOPC and its predecessor, the IPCC, have consistently failed to prosecute cops. In June last year, Black families who had loved ones die in incidents involving the police called for its abolition.
In 2018, the body failed to bring any disciplinary action against 5 police officers involved in the death of Leon Briggs, who died in hospital in 2013 after he wasdetained and restrained by police in Luton, Bedfordshire. Briggs became unresponsive after being restrained in a cell under section 136 of the Mental Health Act. He was then taken to hospital and pronounced dead.
After the CPS decided not to charge the officers involved in Briggs’ death, the IOPC had the responsibility of investigating their misconduct relating to the use of force. All charges were eventually dropped, however, with Bedforshire police blaming the IOPC’s “numerous failings” for not bringing the case to trial.
Following the case, Anita Sharma, head of casework at the Inquest charity, attacked the IOPC:
“Through no fault of their own, bereaved families are being consistently failed and traumatised by this faux system of ‘accountability’,” she said.
“The fact that no officer will be held to account for potential wrongdoing demonstrates the inadequacy of the police complaints process and ineffectiveness of the IOPC.”
Brigg’s family had to wait 5 years only to be told that the case had collapsed due to incompetence. Would politicians in Wales – who are advocating for the IOPC to take the lead in investigating Mohamud Hassan’s death – be happy with a similar outcome?
“30 years ago the police did this same thing to members of my family.” The Case of the Cardiff 3
South Wales Police have their own notorious history when it comes to racism. Perhaps the most well known in living memory is the case of the Cardiff 3, or the Cardiff 5 as it is sometimes referred to.
On Valentine’s Day in 1988, Lynnette White, a 20-year-old sex worker, was found dead with her throat slit and multiple stab wounds. A white man seen leaving the scene became an early suspect, but five young Black men were quickly arrested and charged over the murder.
In 1990, Tony Paris, Yusef Abdullahi and Stephen Miller were convicted and jailed for life. The two other men who had been arrested and charged, John and Ronnie Actie, were acquitted.
In 1992, after a huge campaign, the three men were cleared of murder on appeal, and the true extent of South Wales Police’s racism came to the fore. Miller had been subject to a “hostile and intimidating” interrogation where he had professed his innocence over 300 times. The police were accused of harassing witnesses into lying to secure the wrongful conviction of the 3 Black men.
A trial into 13 South Wales Police officers for misconduct in the case collapsed in 2012 when evidence was said to be destroyed, but then appeared again shortly after. In 2013 however, the IPCC, forerunner to the IOPC, concluded that the investigation into the officers was satisfactory, and no officers would be charged over the historic miscarriage of justice carried out against the Black community of Cardiff.
The case drew global attention, and the campaign for justice was huge. Even the American civil rights activist Al Sharpton – who last year spoke at George Floyd’s funeral – came to Wales and marched in solidarity with the men who had been wrongly convicted.
But the depth of the campaign in Cardiff put enormous pressure on the police and the authorities. Writing about the movement, the socialist activist Des Mannay, who was heavily involved as a student, recalls in an article that originally appeared in Planet Magazine how the campaign grew into a mass movement for justice. The city’s council workers in Cardiff NALGO (now UNISON) voted to back the Cardiff 3 at an AGM because they felt it was their duty to “fight injustice.” After that, he writes, “affiliations flew in” from other trade unions, joining several groups and community organisations in pledging support.
At the protest for Mohamud Hassan, standing at the back in work clothes, was a cousin of John Actie, one of the men wrongly charged for murder. He had known Mohamud, but said he would have come regardless:
“I wasn’t shocked really, coz it’s happened for centuries hasn’t it really. But 2021, after all that happened last year with George Floyd, and all the rest of it. And now it’s happened right on our doorstep so it’s not even happened in some foreign land… It’s just disgusting.”
“I knew the guy personally and he was a nice kid,” said the man, who did not want to be named. “I know he was 24 years old, but I called him a kid because I’m older. He was a nice kid.”
He said that he didn’t think the community was going to stop until something had been done about the police.
“30 years ago the police did this same thing to members of my family, set up as a murder and my family are picking up the pieces of this to this day. My cousin’s John Actie.”
More recently, the case of Christopher Kapessa has again brought the issue of police racism to the fore. A 13 year old Black teenager who drowned in the River Cynon in July 2019, his death was immediately brushed aside as a ‘tragic accident’ by South Wales Police. Surrounded by his white peers when he died, and with the family having already experienced racial abuse in the area, the police failed to secure the crime scene, interview key witnesses or gather important evidence.
Speaking after the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to pursue the case despite finding evidence of possible manslaughter, Christopher Kapessa’s mother accused South Wales Police of institutional racism over the way her son’s death had been dealt with. ‘They’ve failed me and they continue to fail Black families,” she said.
Sitting alongside her as she said that her son’s life would have had more value put on it by the police if he had been white, were Lee Jasper and Hillary Brown, the two people now leading the legal case for the family of Mohamud Hassan.
“His passion was hip hop:” memories of Mohamud Hassan
The funeral for Mohamud Hassan was held in Butetown on Sunday 17th January and was attended by his friends and family. He was described by everyone I spoke to who knew him as a kind, warm and funny person. This has added to the sense of shock and horror which greeted news of his death.
I spoke to the Cardiff musician and teacher 5th Spear, who taught Mohamud, or Mo as he knew him, at ACT academy, which was aimed at secondary aged pupils who were struggling in normal education.
“The thing about Mo was he was actually quite relaxed, and I think respectful, which at the time stood out to me compared to other kids there,” he told me.
“He didn’t go along with the norm of loving grime… His passion was hip hop which if I remember rightly might have been influenced by his brother. Most kids would choose super loud brash grime tracks to spit too but Mo chose chilled tracks and had his own relaxed flow.”
5th Spear said he remembers asking Mo what he got up to one weekend. “[Mo] quite proudly spoke about a community event he attended, where he had to recite some poetry with his family that he seemed to really enjoy.”
After the protests
One of the most striking things about the last two weeks has been how the death of Mohamud Hassan hasn’t registered with the Welsh political and media establishment in the way people may have expected, given the alarming details surrounding his arrest and detainment by the police, and the community response.
On the weekend following his death, and after four days of angry protests, the BBC Radio Wales Sunday Supplement show – billed as a roundup of the most important stories affecting ‘people and politics’ in Wales – didn’t mention Mohamud Hassan’s name once. It was a similar story elsewhere. Did the significance of the case, coming on the back of a year where the Black Lives Matter Movement saw protests erupt across the whole of Wales in outrage at police brutality towards Black and Brown people, not warrant a mention on flagship news programmes?
And while our two dominant media outlets, the BBC and Wales Online, did cover his death and the demonstrations that followed, they didn’t use their clout to press the police over how he obtained his injuries, release of the body cam footage or if the officers involved had been suspended.
Most politicians in Cardiff have either remained silent or stuck to the message that people need to wait for the IOPC to conduct its investigation, which they remind us will take a long time.
But how can this provide reassurance to the family and community of Mohamud Hassan when the same IOPC releases a statement prematurely declaring that his death had nothing to do with physical trauma, whilst knowing that the initial post mortem detailed bodily harm, bruising and bleeding?
Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price did raise the issue in the Senedd, and First Minister Mark Drakeford responded by saying the death was “deeply concerning.” But it was the four days of protests outside Cardiff Bay police station which forced the issue onto the agenda.
And for this the demonstrators have been targeted by the police themselves. Bianca Ali, an activist with Black Lives Matter Cardiff woke up one day that week to find two police vans outside her house. They had come to deliver a court summons for organising the protests (a claim she denies) and said that she would either have to attend court or pay a £500 fine. At the picket of the station, police were seen filming protesters and threatening to use new Covid powers to issue fines.
It was clear that no one took the decision to demonstrate lightly, given the severity of the pandemic, but in general people maintained a distance and wore face masks, and anyone who has been in a busy urban park or supermarket queue over the past few weeks would have been met with a similar sight.
At no point did a senior politician or member of the police attempt to negotiate with the protesters or concede to some of their key demands in return for the crowds to disperse.
All in all, these outdoor gatherings totalled less than 8 hours and had they not marched, it’s debatable how much the life of Mohamud Hassan would have featured in Welsh politics.
The movement that has blown up in the last two weeks is determined to see justice. The pandemic clearly presents very real barriers to organising a mass campaign on the streets, in campuses and workplaces, but the lessons from the fight for justice for the Cardiff 3 remain pertinent. That campaign was taken out to different sections of the community and beyond, building solidarity with different groups, trade unions and high-profile figures. This can be done again.
According to Des Mannay’s account of the campaign in Planet Magazine, when Tony Paris, Yusef Abdullahi and Stephen Miller were finally released on appeal in December 1992, Tony’s brother Lloyd recalled the moment:
“I can remember when the Cardiff 3 were released. It was a bittersweet moment. Everyone was in the Paddle Steamer pub, drinking and being happy, but I couldn’t get into that. All I could think was that they shouldn’t have been inside in the first place, and how my whole family, especially my mum, had suffered.”
The Paddle Steamer will soon be demolished by a council in Cardiff whose leaders have said very little of substance over the death the Mohamud Hassan, but the legacy of the campaign and the memory of victims of institutional racism cannot be forgotten. One of the reasons that the fight for justice for Mohamud Mohammed Hassan is so important is to stop more Black families going through this trauma again.
For updates, see.http://leejasper.blogspot.com/
To donate to the families legal fees, see: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-and-serve-justice-for-mohamud-hassan?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet
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