Afzal moves home after attack over Cummings investigation

FORMER chief crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal has revealed that his family home in Manchester was attacked after he joined a campaign to prosecute prime minister Boris Johnson’s chief advisor Dominic Cummings over alleged lockdown breaches last year.

Afzal told the Guardian that his car was slashed outside his home after he announced he had urged the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service to investigate Cummings’s journeys from London

to Durham as well as to Barnard Castle.

A brick was also thrown through the window of his family home in Manchester, and he later was forced to move house.

“My family felt scared. I don’t blame Dominic Cummings. All I know is in 25 years of prosecuting some of the most organised criminals in the country, nobody has attacked my home.

“Yet suddenly someone started attacking me and my family and we have had to move house,” he was quoted as saying.

“There’s always a personal cost to standing up [for] what’s right. In 2006, I was on an al-Qaeda death list after I prosecuted Danish cartoon protesters, and in 2012, the far right demonstrated outside my house after the Rochdale grooming gang case.

“I accept that people will attack me personally, but I draw the line when my family is involved.”

Cummings, who resigned from the government in November last year, denied his movements during the first lockdown amounted to a breach of Covid regulations.

In December, Durham police revealed it was assessing a 225page dossier submitted by Afzal and his lawyers, alleging Cummings breached the lockdown rules multiple times and perverted the course of justice in his account of his movements.

Afzal was a former senior prosecutor for London and the chief prosecutor for north-west England until 2015. His older brother Umar died of coronavirus in April last year while isolating at home in Birmingham. Weeks later,

LAW AND ORDER: Nazir Afzal his mother also passed away. In April, a paperback version of Afzal’s book The Prosecutor will be published, with a new chapter on his brother’s death and the Cummings

affair.