This is the moment a rioter was arrested on-board a plane as he returned to the UK from a holiday in Greece after causing disorder in Southport.
Thomas Whitehead, 53 of Pool Street, Southport, who worked as a gardener, was removed off a Ryanair plane as it touched down in Manchester Airport on August 13 and was taken into police custody.
In footage shared by Merseyside Police, Whitehead can be seen being escorted off a plane by officers and into a police vehicle.
The dad-of-three now faces 20 months in prison for throwing an object during the far-right riots that took place across England and Northern Ireland earlier this month, which erupted following the tragic murders of three young girls in Southport on July 29.
This is the moment a rioter was arrested on-board a plane as he returned to the UK from a holiday in Greece after causing disorder in Southport
Gardener and dad-of-three Thomas Whitehead now faces up to 20 months in prison
Thomas Whitehead, 53, who was arrested on a plane at Manchester Airport
He was one of the five people sentenced at Liverpool Crown Court on Wednesday.
The court was told he ‘does not know what took hold of him when he threw that one missile from the back of the group’.
According to Mirror, Whitehead has 18 previous convictions for 47 offences between 1987 and 1998.
Many rioters involved in the violent unrest are now being humbled as they face Britain’s justice system.
Police have arrested more than 1,000 people across Britain for rioting.
Civil unrest erupted outside a mosque in Southport over misinformation online that the teenage suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived in the UK on a small boat.
Riots began to spread like wildfire across other parts of the country, with far-right thugs seen launching bricks at officers, torching police cars and targeting hotels housing asylum seekers.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer had warned that rioters would face the ‘full force of the law’, with many facing justice this month.
According to Mirror , Whitehead has 18 previous convictions for 47 offences between 1987 and 1998
This comes after a Pakistani web developer accused of spreading disinformation about the Southport knifeman which triggered the riots accross the UK was charged with cyber terrorism.
Farhan Asif reportedly worked for news aggregation website Channel3Now – which a Daily Mail investigation revealed started out as an obscure Russian YouTube channel ten years ago and spread the misinformation to millions online.
It was falsely claimed that the knifeman – whose identity could not be published at the time due to his age – was a migrant who arrived in the UK via boat and was on an MI6 watchlist.
Police in Pakistan have charged Asif with cyber terrorism, in relation to the disinformation thought to have fuelled the widespread rioting.
He has been charged under Section 9 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) 2016, which outlaws creating ‘a sense of fear or insecurity in society’.
Federal investigators in Pakistan were given a day to question Asif by a court on Wednesday, and he is due to appear in court on Thursday when investigators are expected to seek more time to interrogate him.