A drug squad detective repeatedly hit a suspect on the head and hand with a bat as a colleague held him down, a trial has been told.
Alastair Carrie said Detective Constable Russell Gillespie shouted: “Hold him down, I’ll break his f****** fingers” after he was pulled from his vehicle on an Angus road.
Gillespie, 42, denies a total of 11 charges dating back to November 2009, including assaulting Mr Carrie in March 2010.
Mr Carrie, 53, told the trial at Dundee Sheriff Court on Wednesday that he was in the vehicle with Christopher McIntosh, who had earlier been involved in a drug deal and who had thrown the drugs into a ditch.
Two cars stopped in front and at the side of Mr Carrie’s vehicle and a number of men ran up to it.
Mr Carrie said he was pulled from the vehicle and on to the ground by one of the men.
He said: “I was on the ground. There was a person on my back holding my hand out and another man swiping at my hand. He was attempting to hit my hand with a bat.”
Mr Carrie said “without a shadow of a doubt” Russell Gillespie was the man with the bat.
He said: “He was hitting me over the hand with it saying, ‘Hold him down, I’ll break his f****** fingers.’
“It sparked a couple of times off the road and it hit my knuckle.
“He started hitting me on the head with the short end of the bat three or four times.”
Mr Carrie said he suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and Gillespie had only stopped “because he thought I was having a heart attack”.
Beverley Adam, prosecuting, asked: “Did you struggle with the officers?”
He replied: “I’ve only got 21% lung capacity, it would be impossible for me to struggle with anyone.”
Defence advocate Shelagh McColl put it to Mr Carrie that he had lied to the trial.
He replied: “I don’t have anything against the man, except he beat me up.”
In earlier evidence, taxi driver Maurice Fraser, 46, said Gillespie had punched him in the face through the open window of his cab in May 2011 in Lochee after he pulled over after hearing police sirens.
Mr Fraser said: “I was kind of shocked. I didn’t expect it to happen. It was unnecessary, I wasn’t attempting to go anywhere.”
He said another man, Jamie Duncan, had jumped out of the taxi as it slowed down and thrown a rucksack under a minibus.
Mr Fraser denied he was aware drug squad officers were attempting to stop his vehicle and that he had only pulled in to “let the blue lights past”.
The trial continues.