Christopher Houghton appears at the Old Bailey

A police officer was left with a knife wound that cut into his bowel after an attack by Wembley a man in a butcher’s shop in Kingsbury, a court heard today.

Christopher Haughton, 33, of Milford Gardens, brandished the weapon with an 8-10 inch (20-25cms) blade after grabbing the knife from the store in Kenton Road, the Old Bailey was told.

Prosecutor Edward Brown QC said: “Some of the officers suffered very significant injuries indeed, all the result of this defendant’s violence.

“It was perhaps only a matter of very good fortune that some of the police officers escaped with their lives.”

One officer was left with a knife wound that cut into his bowel and required emergency surgery.

Another officer was left with a knife wound that cut through his cheek into his mouth, a wound that missed his eye by millimetres.

A third suffered two very deep knife wounds to the leg while others had minor injuries.

Mr Brown added: “One was not injured at all, although, had the defendant not been stopped, that officer would have received a very serious knife wound to his neck, with obvious potential consequences.”

Haughton was overcome and arrested following the incident in November, last year.

At the time he was on bail following a disturbance at his girlfriend’s home a month earlier when he had allegedly attacked three more officers.

Mr Brown said in November, officers were called to reports of Haughton causing a disturbance. Attempts to calm him

failed and he bit an officer’s fleece, tearing it with his teeth.

Extra back-up was called for after Haughton gathered masonry and other missiles and threw them at officers.

They followed him for 300 metres until he went into the cutting area of a halal butcher’s shop in Kingsbury Road.

Mr Brown told the jury: “The defendant was angry and as you will come to appreciate directing all his anger towards the police.

“The next few moments witnessed a series of frenzied and quick moving attacks by this defendant on the police using the butcher’s knife which caused really significant injuries which were potentially fatal.”

Haughton had pushed PC Thomas Harding to the ground and straddled him whilst bringing the knife down on his shield.

One of the strikes was so hard that it went through the shield and penetrated eight inches into the officer’s abdomen, perforating his bowel, said Mr Brown.

He continued: “It will become plain during the evidence that the defendant was in a disturbed state of mind at the time.

“In the months that followed he was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.”

Haughton denies offences of attempted murder of four officers and six other charges of assault on their colleagues.