Dizaei, 49, once made £90,000 ($135,000) a year as a senior police officer with Scotland Yard, the London area police force.
The first charge against Dizaei alleges misconduct in public office for arresting a man with whom he was having a dispute, knowing there were no reasonable grounds for arrest. The man in question was a fellow Iranian-Briton who had done work for Dizaei and was complaining he had not been paid.
The second charge alleges Dizaei “did a series of acts which had a tendency to pervert the course of public justice” by falsely saying in oral and written statements that the man he arrested had first physically assaulted him.
The two men were in a dispute over payment for a website that the one Iranian, who uses the Arab name Waad Al-Baghdadi, created for Dizaei.
Dizaei said Al-Baghdadi had shouted abuse at him through the passenger window as he sat in an unmarked police car outside the Persian Yas restaurant in west London in July 2008.
Dizaei told Southwark Crown Court that his wife, who was in the car, had been caught in the “crossfire” and “frightened’’ by Al-Baghdadi’s “torrent of abuse.”
Dizaei said he got out of the car to warn Al-Baghdadi after attempts to to calm him down had gone unheeded. “He would not stop, he said something to me in Farsi which really caused me concern,’’ Dizaei said.
“He said in Farsi to me he is ‘going to take the money out of my throat.’ “That might not make sense in English, but it is a threat.’’
Dizaei told the court that Al-Baghdadi had gone back into the restaurant after the exchange. “He said something like ‘if your wife wasn’t here, I would sort you out,’ or something like that.”
Dizaei said the owner of the restaurant had requested that he ask Al-Baghdadi to leave. “He said to me, ‘I don’t want him in the restaurant, he is a trouble maker, can you ask him to go?’,’’ Dizaei told the court.
Al-Baghdadi finally left. Dizaei told the court Al-Baghdadi had walked toward a junction and then shouted “pimp” at him in Farsi and had gestured with one finger.
Dizaei said the restaurant owner had said to him, “Please don’t go until I get him out.” Dizaei said Al-Baghdadi reappeared three or four times at a nearby junction with his mobile phone at his ear and using the one finger gesture.
At this point, Dizaei said he decided he would arrest Al-Baghdadi. “At the time I made the decision that Mr. Al-Baghdadi had committed an offence, he had been given a warning, he was not going to go away,’’ he told the court.
He said he had nearly lost his balance after he was given a “very hard push’’ to the chest by Al-Baghdadi as he approached him. Dizaei said Al-Baghdadi had later poked him in a “jabbing motion’’ in the abdomen.
“I hit his hand with my hand and something flew out of his hand,’’ he told the court. “It was certainly an object, it was not a collection of keys, it was one object that fell out of his hand,’’ he said.
Dizaei denied using disproportionate or excessive force against Al-Baghdadi.
Earlier, Dizaei told the court how he had initially refused an offer from Al-Baghdadi to create a personal website.
“I said to him that I did not need a website. He said could I think about it. He said I can put it on my portfolio, it is not going to cost you anything.” He said he eventually agreed to have the website created.
But Dizaei said he had set out conditions including that he needed to approve the website before it was put online and that he also needed to receive permission from the Metropolitan Police.
“I have never had a website before, so I was not entirely sure what I needed to do,’’ Dizaei testified.
He said the pair met before the confrontation and it became apparent there were a number of mistakes on the website. “He was packing up to go, and he said he had already put this website on his portfolio as it was.
“I said, ‘How? We agreed that this has to be finished before you advertise it’ and he just laughed and said ‘I have done it.’
“I said, “You know what our agreement was. I had an understanding that I had to be happy with this before you put it online or you advertise on your portfolio. You have broken that promise; you have broken that trust. I am not interested any more’.’’
Dizaei was convicted at his first trial and sent off to prison. But an appeals court ordered a retrial when it was learned that his accuser had lied repeatedly, for example, claiming to be Iraqi rather than Iranian to gain entry to Britain and collecting welfare payments in his father’s name long after the father had died.
Dizaei was born in Tehran in 1962. He says his family is steeped in policing with his father heading the Tehran traffic police and his grandfather being the deputy chief of the capital’s police force.
