Girma Belay was in the wrong place at the wrong time. As he sat in a flat in Stockwell, south London, waiting for a friend to bake Ethiopian bread, he was seized at gunpoint by anti-terror police with laser-sighted weapons, forced to strip naked, punched, beaten and humiliated. With the red laser beam blinding him, he heard someone shout, “Take him out.”
Held for six days at Paddington Green police station, Mr Belay is a shattered man. Tortured by flashbacks and gripped by fear, he clenches his fists and weeps when he describes what happened. He repeats to himself the words of one detective on his release: “Sorry mate – wrong place, wrong time.” But it does not seem to help.
In this instance, as in the Stockwell tube shooting, the victim wasn’t even a Muslim. But what the heck, he was Ethiopian, he lived in Stockwell – what more do you want?
Melanie Phillips et al will no doubt be pleased to know that there are at least some police officers who refuse to be hamstrung by Ian Blair’s abject capitulation to political correctness