On 3rd August, Dr. Rashid Abbasi disclosed that he and his wife were forcefully removed from their daughter’s bedside in the hospital ward, after they refused to leave her to die alone. The bodycam footage, which was taken by their family several months to secure from police, shows two officers pulling his wife by her hijab, and another two grabbing him by the neck.
Writing in his column in The Metro, he said, “When I told them I had chest pains and was suffering a heart attack (which I was), one told me callously that I’d ‘brought this on yourself’. When I begged for my medicine, the response was conditional: if you calm down’. One officer shouted ‘you are acting like an animal, it’s disgusting’. Another seemed to agree, telling me that ‘if you act like an animal, you’ll be treated like one’.
“I was treated like one, although I did nothing wrong that night. Despite officers claiming that (while fully restrained) I kicked and bit them, I was quickly de-arrested and have not been charged with any crime. But in the eyes of the staff caring for my child, I was perhaps guilty of one: inconveniently trying to save my daughter’s life.
“The police cannot plead ignorance of the circumstances. As soon as they arrived, my wife told them ‘we have just been told about half an hour ago that they’re going to take the tube out and our daughter is going to die’. That was why, when repeatedly asked to leave her bedside, I refused. Like any parents, my wife and I wanted to at least say goodbye. My wife and I are no strangers to the difficult conversations around child palliative care. We are both qualified doctors, and I have been a consultant in respiratory medicine for 24 years in a neighbouring NHS trust to the one that I entrusted with my daughter’s life. When she was two years old, my daughter Zainab was diagnosed with a rare and incurable genetic disease. For years afterwards, there was near constant pressure from doctors to switch off life support whenever she was unwell.”
