Patient who harassed London paramedic jailed under new law

When paramedic Ella Johnson responded to a 999 call in April, she rushed to the scene with her female colleague to try to help the patient.

But far from being grateful for their support, the man quickly became abusive towards the two women.

“We literally just arrived on scene, announced that we were here to help, but he just came back with verbal sexual abuse straight away,” she said.

The paramedics had been told that the patient had been found unconscious at a bus stop in Shepherd’s Bush, west London.

“We tried to help him back up from the floor into the ambulance, but he was kind of like, pushing out his hands, getting quite ‘grabby’ and continuing with the sort of sexual comments towards me and my colleague.”

Johnson said the experience was “frightening.”

“The whole time we were saying, you know, ‘we’re the ambulance, we’re here to help, we’d like to get you on the ambulance to do an assessment’, but it was just quite difficult to manage because he was grabbing out and saying some quite nasty things.”

At this point, Johnson said they called the police for help, who ended up arresting the man and taking him into custody.

Ahmed Sheiki Ahmed was charged under a new law banning harassment motivated by a person’s sex, four days after the legislation came into force.

He pleaded guilty to using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress on account of a person’s sex, at Westminster Magistrates Court on Wednesday.

Ahmed, who also admitted being drunk and disorderly, was sentenced to 12 weeks in prison and ordered to pay compensation of £150.