Cook cleared of knife attack on Cannock waiter
A cook accused of assaulting a waiter at a restaurant in Cannock by knifing him in the stomach has been cleared by a jury.
Kitchen hand Mohibul Babul told Stafford Crown Court he tripped with a 12-inch meat knife in his hand, which caused the blade to cut Mr Nazim Meah across the stomach.
The defendant denied it was a 'revenge' attack on the waiter because the two men had come to blows three days earlier in Cannock's Eastern Memories restaurant. The jury heard that Mr
Meah screamed out in pain and almost fainted as the knife cut him across his side. The wound was not serious but it had to be glued by hospital medics.
The prosecution alleged that Babul had taken the opportunity to attack the waiter in the restaurant's narrow kitchen.
But Babul, aged 34, of New Mills Street, Walsall, was found not guilty of a charge of assault causing actual bodily harm. The jury reached a unanimous verdict in his favour within an hour.
Mr Tim Baldwin, defending, said in his closing speech:?"This is an unusual case, you have a defendant whose act is simply this – 'yes, I inflicted the injury, but the cause was purely an accident and no more'.
"What you have heard is a complainant who was of the opinion this was a deliberate act; the reason was simply this, that it must be deliberate because of what happened on the Friday, he assumed that because there had been some incident and bad feeling three days before, this was the defendant taking the opportunity to seek some sort of revenge."
Giving evidence, Babul told the jury he was passing Mr Meah in the narrow kitchen when he tripped over a cooking oil drum left in the passageway. He made a grab for the freezer to stop himself falling and the knife cut the waiter.
"I felt shocked and there was people coming to me to see what happened," he said.
"I felt really sorry and I was sorry. I don't know why he said I didn't say sorry. This was an accident."
