In February of this year, Mouayed Bashir died after being restrained on the floor of his bedroom by police in Newport. Since then, his two brothers and parents have had their lives thrown into turmoil as they battle for the truth about what happened that day. But this isn’t all they’ve had to deal with. Eight months on, the Bashir family are still in the same home in which Mouayed died, a council house owned by the local housing association.
Mohannad Bashir, Mouayed’s older brother, spoke to SC Cook about being forced to relive the trauma of the death, the failings of the housing and justice system, and why Black History Month can’t be used to gloss over racism in Welsh institutions.
Image: Mohannad Bashir outside the family home in Newport, by SC Cook
When Mohannad Bashir picks up the phone to answer my call, one of the first things he tells me is that he is sitting in the same room that his brother died in 8 months ago.
The small bedroom has become his work and sleeping space, where he is forced to spend the majority of his day.
This time last year, however, it was the bedroom of Mouayed Bashir, younger sibling of Mohannad.
In February of this year, Mouayed, 29, died in the most horrific circumstances after Gwent Police officers forced their way into his room and restrained him on the ground after responding to a mental health crisis.
Mohannad and his younger brother were not at home at the time. Their parents, however, were both in the house and were prevented from entering their son’s room, forced to hear him in immense distress before falling silent.
When an ambulance finally arrived, they had to watch him be taken out of his room by paramedics and transported to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.
After the death of his brother, Mohannad quickly quit his life in London and moved back to the family home in Maes Glas, Newport so he could help his parents and younger brother. In particular, Mohannad took over the handling of Mouayed’s case from his dad, from liaising with the family’s lawyers to being the face of the campaign.
Moving back was a “no brainer,” he says, because he had to be there for the family.
“Of course, it was just traumatising, after what happened and being in the same place, and I realised that I’m the one who’s gonna be taking over Mouayed’s room. And in my head, I’m like, ‘Okay, so this is it. This is the firepit. I’m in the eye of the storm, basically.”
Mohannad now works in the room on the computer for around 12 hours a day. “That’s a long time,” he explains. “And then at night, I want to go to bed, or when I go to sleep, it’s in the same spot.”
Mohannad cannot even go about what would be considered normal, mundane acts without reliving what went on. “I’m looking at the mirror while I’m brushing my teeth, and I’m thinking, ‘this might be the last time that Mouayed had a look at his face before he died.’”
“Then going back into the room and getting ready, starting my day getting changed and thinking, ‘this might be the last time Mouayed was getting ready’. Coz it literally feels as if I’m living the last moments of his life.”
For any family losing a loved one is hard, but attempting to move on whilst living in the same house where Mouayed died – and died in such traumatic circumstances – makes the grieving process almost impossible. Yet 8 months down the line and the local housing association who own the house, Newport City Homes, have been unable to find a suitable new property for the Bashirs.
The delay is having a major impact.
Mohannad tries to remain strong for his parents, but admits that dealing with things on a day to day basis is like prison for the family.
“It’s like being locked up,” he says. “Like being sent to prison for a crime that we didn’t commit.”
His parents avoid the bedroom as much as possible, yet are often in the house due to their own health conditions. “My dad, he just doesn’t bother coming into the bedroom upstairs anymore, he just carries on being in the living room” Mohannad says. “He prays all the time, it’s really difficult for them to come into the room where everything happened.”
Perhaps hardest of all for the family is the fact that they still sometimes come across physical signs and reminders of the morning when Mouayed died.
“There are still some traces of blood on the wall or some dents on the corner of the frame of the door where the police forced themselves in,” explains Mohannad. “So there’s memories of what happened that morning and traces of it wherever I look.”
The family have been living at the property for over two decades, and were already on the waiting list to move for over five years due to the parents’ health needs. Since Mouayed’s death however, the situation has become far more desperate.
Eight months on and there is still no suitable home on the immediate horizon. After some pressure, the housing association has shown the family some prospective properties, but none have been appropriate.
In one incident, they were shown a house next to the same police station where the officers that held Mouayed on the ground before he died still come and go to work. It was a thought that made Mohannad’s blood run cold, describing it as an “insult to injury.”
“What was the thinking process there?” he asks. In other cases, the house has been in an area where he knows his parents simply wouldn’t feel safe.
The family’s lawyer, the leading civil rights activist Hillary Brown, says the fact that the family still haven’t been re-housed shows Newport City Council and the housing association in a bad light.
“It’s a very high profile, well known case,” she tells me. “So it’s not as if they don’t know the tragic details of what happened to Mouayed. It’s not as if they wouldn’t know the consequences of the terrible events of the day, when a son died feet away from both parents in an extremely traumatic incident.”
“I know that every time the family walks in through that front door there are tears, there is trauma. I don’t know how a local authority can be so unsympathetic, I don’t understand it.”
Brown says that it’s not enough to say that other people are on the waiting list when their house is a housing association property, meaning it will become available for reuse if the family moves.
After Mouayed died, the family were hoping the move would happen quickly, but Mohannad feels that their case isn’t a major priority.
Newport City Homes say the case is a priority and told me that they understand the “urgent need for the Bashir family to move following the tragic death of their son,” and that they have been “working closely with them to find a home that meets their needs and aspirations.”
In a fuller statement below, they also say they have offered four homes to the family, but these have not been suitable, adding that “demand in Newport is significantly high.”
For Mohannad Bashir, who is constantly trying to push things forward, the situation has also revealed how broken the housing system is in general.
“The quality of the (council) housing is so bad, it’s quite poor, literally poor – for poor people. Is that what it’s supposed to be?”
He says many of the houses have been allowed to fall into disrepair. “You just felt a little bit insulted that you would be expected to be grateful for that place.”
Something else has also revealed itself to a greater degree over the past few months as well: the gaping disparity between homes for those with money and those who have to rely on the state.
“Whenever I’m going around Newport, I can see skyscrapers or like construction sites of new properties being built, and being advertised in The Argus or whatever, new buildings coming up in 2022 or 2023.”
“I guarantee you 95% of that is all private. And who gets the money, who gets the biggest portion?” Mohannad asks. “People with deep pockets, and the rest of the 5% that will go down to the council but then literally, first come first serve, because everyone’s looking for the same thing.”
Whilst Mohannad and his family want desperately to leave their home, they are forced to stare at expensive property that is off-limits to them.
This failure of the council to re-house the Bashir family is a mirror image of the state’s failings when it comes to the case of Mouayed Bashir itself.
The family do not yet have a date for the inquest trial hearing and know it certainly won’t be this year.
They welcomed the decision to hold a trial with a full jury present, indicating they have a case, but this has also caused further delay.
“We’re waiting for the process to take its course, and it’s so frustrating,” says lawyer Hillary Brown. “Covid has hugely and detrimentally affected all of the court system, including the coroners court.”
But Covid is not the only reason there is a delay: The Independent Office for Police Contact (IOPC), who are supposed to be the independent body investigating Mouayed Bashir’s death, still have not delivered a report to the coroner.
Ms Brown has no idea why the report is taking so long, but says that even when it comes, it will be screened by the coroner first. “[They] will make a decision as to what can and can’t be disclosed to us.”
This way in which the justice system locks out victims like the Bashir family is not lost on Mohannad.
“Someone actually mentioned that to me the other day,” he recalls. “Where there’s some tactic…where it’s like, ‘they’ll forget about it. Let’s just push them back a little bit because it’s not that urgent, it’s not that important or it’s not that much of a big deal.’”
“But if that is the attitude,” Mohannad continues, “with the housing and about the inquest itself, that kind of puts a big question about the whole system.”
“Why are we being treated like this? Aren’t we worth anything? You know? Is this because of the colour of our skin? I’m gonna say that boldly.”
This stark reality of the enormous barriers to justice is also facing other black families in Wales. The loved ones of Mohamud Hassan, Christopher Kapessa and Siyanda MnGaza have also all spoken out against racism in the justice system in Wales.
Their experience puts into sharp perspective the claim that the Welsh establishment is committed to anti-racism.
“Basically, south Wales has this huge number of cases of police brutality against ethnic minorities,” Mohannad points out. “And then the cases are either being delayed or not taken seriously. And on top of that, how do we trust the IOPC, and that the evidence that’s been provided by the police is genuine?”
He is worried that Black deaths in police custody are becoming normalised in Britain, and says people can no longer think that this is an issue mostly confined to the US.
Mohannad even recalls how Mouayed thought that the racist murder George Floyd by a US cop in May 2020, which sparked a global Black Lives Matter Movement, wouldn’t have happened here.
“He [Mouayed] was shocked and surprised, like, ‘wow, this is over there. Luckily, this doesn’t happen over here in the UK.’ And guess what? He died under police restraint in his own bedroom, in the family home in south Wales.”
Now the case and subsequent delay have only brought home how bad things are when it comes to the justice system.
“Why isn’t our case a high priority?” he asks bluntly. “Why isn’t it making shockwaves you know…is this becoming the norm now. It’s just another black kid who died. Are we at that level!?”
Mohannad welcomes the recent unveiling of the Betty Campbell statue in Cardiff and the teaching of Black history in the new Welsh Curriculum, but says it shouldn’t be used by establishment figures to hide what is happening to families like his.
“It’s good to see all this recognition. But why did it take so long?” he asks. “Why now? Are they [politicians] just jumping on the bandwagon of Black History Month?”
Lawyer Hillary Brown agrees, saying that it is “difficult” to assess where Wales is with anti racism during Black History Month. “I think it’s absolutely amazing that Betty has a statue in her honour,” she says. “Because Betty deserves a statue. She was a pioneer, and she was a trailblazer.”
“But let’s not forget that many of the same people that stood up, and you know, spoke very highly of her were the very same people that she fought and battled with when she was alive, striving for justice and equality.”
Should political figures in Wales be willing to put their neck on the line more when it comes to cases like the Bashir family, I ask?
“Yeah, absolutely,” says Brown. “But of course, you know, the politicians would rather focus on a statue and use that as a measure of how far they’ve come towards equality and inclusion, rather than deal with what’s going on currently.”
One issue that recently caught the attention of Mohannad Bashir was when the Newport East MP, Jessica Morden, posed for a picture at the Labour party conference with a ‘Labour Friends of the Police,” sign, saying she was proud to support the launch of the group.
“It is a shame because I know her personally and she knows the family, she knew Mouayed. And to hold that sign. Yeah, it’s just sad. But I guess it’s just politics, right?”
Mohannad is keen to point out that Morden has helped in the family’s search for a new home, but it doesn’t hide his disappointment when she so uncritically backs the cops.
One of the lessons that can be learnt from the past year is that political actors, however good their words, cannot be relied upon to fight cases of police racism and brutality in the here and now.
Immediately after Mouayed Bashir died, an angry, lively protest was held in Newport which helped give the issue the kind of exposure it may never have had otherwise.
His younger brother, Mohammud Bashir, spoke to the crowd that day saying that his brother “had the energy to take on the world.” He hit out at the police, demanding to know why his brother was tied up using leg restraints when he already had a serious injury.
“If you got handcuffs, why are you tying him up? This ain’t Guantanamo bay. He ain’t a terrorist. What you doing tying someone up?” he shouted to the large crowd.
There were similar scenes in Cardiff just four weeks earlier, when several days of protest erupted after the shocking death of Mohamud Hassan, who told several witnesses he had been violently assaulted by police before he died. The crowds of often young, Black protesters demanded answers and the release of crucial body camera footage.
Both protests saw a similar level of disinterest from politicians however, whose support could have helped shield people from the police crackdown that was to come.
“What we saw was that when there was a coming together of people in the form of protests. South Wales Police went to great effort to try to use strategies to discourage people from protesting,” recalls Hillary Brown, before criticising political figures who have said little or nothing about the attack on protesters.
“I think that their tactic at this time is to remain silent,” she says.
There was even a mooted reaction, bar some notable exceptions, when it came to key demands from the families, such as the release of vital video footage. Failing to put pressure on the police to release this early on could prove crucial in the long run, as the IOPC recently admitted it had been unable to obtain some footage from South Wales Police in the Mohamud Hassan case.
For Mohannad, bitter experience has brought home the fact that the state, its institutions and its political class are not there to serve or help him. Even the fact that the family is still in the same house tells its own story.
“The fact that it happened in February, you would think, by default that they [Newport City Homes] would put us in a priority list, or somehow just move us to another place or kind of fast track the process,” he says. “But that wasn’t the case.”
The Bashir family are desperately hoping to move before winter really sets in, but time is running out.
“All we need is just kind of a restart, a new phase, a new chapter,” Mohannad tells me.
There is some relief that they have been told they have a case going to trial next year, but he knows how much mental energy it will take to prepare.
“It’s not going to be easy, so if we can prepare ourselves now and have a bit of recovery mentally and physically, by getting out of this house, it would help us to be stronger to fight.”
The need to leave the house is serious, and there is a real danger facing the family when it comes to mental health if they don’t move.
When the family went to view one house that seemed more suitable on the face of it, the fact that it was by a train track was a real concern for Mohannad.
“Because what we are going through right now with our mental health is not ideal for anyone to live next to a train track where, you know, some of us have some suicidal thoughts. So it’s no good.”
Mohannad deals with all of this incredibly well. He says his professional experience has helped him advocate for the family when it comes to the authorities, and doesn’t like to think where they would be right now if he wasn’t around.
When we meet outside the house to take a photo, he explains how he’s keen to keep his parents and younger brother away from the spotlight of the campaign.
But the situation is inevitably taking its toll on him as well.
“I spend 90% of my day, Monday to Friday, in the same room where everything went down…that’s having a toll, you know, having an impact on me… But I’m trying my best to, you know, support my family by being there for them.”
What hasn’t been there for the Bashir family is the state, which has so far failed them.
Of course they won’t give in, but they are battling a rigged system.
In a statement, Newport City Homes said:
“We completely understand the urgent need for the Bashir family to move following the tragic death of their son, and we have been working closely with them to find a home that meets their needs and aspirations.
Based on detailed criteria set by the family, to date we have made four offers of alternative homes and have also facilitated an offer of a new build home with another housing association. Unfortunately the family didn’t feel these homes met their requirements.
Every empty home we have had that fits the criteria set out by the Bashir family, has been offered to them. We are doing all that we can to support the family and will continue to assist them to move out of their current home.
Unfortunately, we cannot provide a home if none are available, and housing demand in Newport is significantly high.
…This is a highly detailed case, and we are continuing to work with the Bashir family to offer a number of options to help them make an informed decision and support them in moving away from their current property.”
To donate or support the Justice for Mouayed Bashir campaign, go here: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/black-man-dies-under-police-restraint/
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