A man accused of assaulting three police officers at Manchester Airport said he headbutted a member of public in self-defence.
Mohammed Fahir Amaaz, 20, told Liverpool Crown Court that he visited the airport on the evening of July 23 to collect his mother from an incoming flight from Pakistan.
His brother, Muhammad Amaad, 26, and their young nephew joined him to greet his mother at Terminal 2 arrivals, he said.
Amaaz said: “At first she was happy to see us but it turned into a sad moment pretty quickly.
“After we hugged and kissed I asked her how her flight was and she told me it was the worst eight hours of her life.
“She started to break down. She said there was a man on the flight who had been bothering her non-stop and had called her a Paki bitch again and again.”
As they walked through arrivals, his mother noticed the man in a Starbucks coffee shop and pointed him out, he said.
Amaaz said he calmly approached the male who was “a lot bigger than me”.
He said: “I said, ‘look, this is my mum behind me, she is a 58-year-old woman who has got low blood sugars and high cholesterol, she is always in and out of hospital.
“I said, ‘there is no need for this, just admit it and apologise and that’s it.
“He said ‘no, go from here’. He shouted at me.
“His wife says to me, ‘he didn’t say that to your mum, he said it to a little girl’.
“I thought that just makes it 10 times worse. It made even more upset.”
He said the man refused to apologise and then said to him: “You know who I am, I will smash you.”
Amaaz said: “Given his size and demeanour I felt scared. To be honest I just wanted to get away from him.
“He took a step towards me and said ‘I will f****** kill you’.
“I thought this man is going to attack me any second now so I struck him twice.
“I headbutted him. Straight after the headbutt I did punch him. I don’t think it landed.”
He said the man repeated his threat to kill him and he decided to leave.
Amaaz said: “When we were walking off he was on his phone and shouted, ‘wait outside, five minutes’.
“I thought he was on his phone to one of his friends to ask him to come down and probably attack us.”
Shortly after, at the T2 car park paystation, he was approached by three police officers who grabbed him after they had received a report of an assault at Starbucks.
His barrister Imran Khan KC asked: “At that precise moment, what was going through your mind?”
Amaaz said: “I was thinking it might be the person who was on the phone to the man who had made threats to us.”
He said he “tensed up” as he did not know who had grabbed him.
Mr Khan said: “Had you known it was the police, what would you have done?”
Amaaz replied: “I simply would have waited for them to say to me what they needed me to do.”
Jurors have heard that the customer in Starbucks, Kuwaiti national Abdulkareem Ismaeil, did not want to pursue a complaint against Amaaz as he wanted to get on with his family holiday.
Amaaz, of Rochdale, Greater Manchester, denies two counts of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, one count of assaulting an emergency worker and one count of assaulting Mr Ismaeil.
