Thursday January 12, 2023
By Tom Foot
'There is no way this should be a normal way of life', says man as embarrassed officers leave empty-handed
A TEACHER has told how he feared for his life as armed police in full combat gear burst into his home in a botched raid.
Omar Abdo opened the door of his family home in Kentish Town to a phalanx of officers pointing large guns and shouting orders from behind a shield and a battering ram on Friday afternoon.
The 31-year-old said he was handcuffed and “dragged” down the street before being driven around in an unmarked car for several hours. He was later released without charge.
With a police helicopter buzzing above and children walking back from school on Friday afternoon, police cordoned off Castlehaven Road, Castle Road and Kelly Street.
The officers, based in a south London specialist crime unit, were executing a firearms warrant with sniffer dogs and metal detectors.
The New Journal asked the Met Police for its version of events but over several days various spokespeople insisted they had no record of any police activity in the street that day.
Police armed with guns at Mr Abdo’s home
We sent them a photograph of the raid that was caught on camera, as published in today’s (Thursday’s paper). There is video footage as well.
Mr Abdo, who has lived in Camden all his life, called on the police to improve their research before taking extreme measures that could leave psychological scars, adding that he wanted to “speak up” on behalf of the Somali community in Camden.
He said: “All I could see was a lot of guns in my face and all I could think was that my life was over. “I really thought I was going to get a bag thrown over my head and I was going to get taken away. It felt like the army was coming in and no one would know where I had gone.
“I didn’t hear them say police. They could have shot me and made up some excuse after. I asked them why. They weren’t giving me any information. I didn’t know what was going on.”
Mr Abdo added: “I sound very calm now, but inside I’m not. I am shaken. I didn’t want to go home for the first couple of days. If this can happen now, can it happen again? I can’t get on with my life.
“It was unnecessarily aggressive and an invasion of my privacy. I just think that something is institutionally wrong with their procedures and checks and they need to look at that. Afterwards they were not remorseful. They could have kept me in the house. They dragged me down the street in front of all of my neighbours. I felt like it was all an adrenaline rush for them.
“Somewhere down the line, I don’t know how it’s happened, but they’ve made a real big blunder.”
The New Journal has seen a copy of the warrant for a search of the property as part of a firearms investigation launched by officers working for the “Specialist Crime South”. The warrant was for firearms, imitation firearms, ammunition and firearms components.
Witnesses told how around a dozen marked and unmarked cars had swung out of Kentish Town police station at around 4pm and headed down to Castle Road.
Footage was sent to us by shocked passers-by. Mr Abdo said: “In the Somali community here in Camden, when something like this happens, they won’t want to take this forward. They will just think this is another day. They need to change their mindset and speak out so it doesn’t happen to other people again. That’s why I am speaking out. There is no way this should be part of normal life.”
The Met Police’s “Press Bureau” publicity arm insisted it had made a series of checks on its database and could not find anything about what had happened, and told us on Monday that there isn’t anything more they could do.
The National Crime Agency – which runs specialist police operations – also said it had nothing to do with them.
Mr Abdo has returned from China where he was teaching English in a school for three years. He has recently finished an IT course and said he was looking at getting into “data engineering”.
He said that he had been wrongly stopped by firearms officers five years ago in Kentish Town and that he “used to get stopped a bit when I was a kid”, adding: “Who doesn’t growing up in Camden?”
Last night (Wednesday), a Met spokesman said: “On Friday, January 6, officers executed a warrant under the Firearms Act at a residential address in Castle Road, Entry was conducted by specialist firearms officers. No police firearms or taser were discharged. The address was searched and nothing found. No arrests were made.”