A KILLER driver is now behind bars for 15 years after brutally attacking a cab driver in his own home while on bail for mowing down a cyclist.

Akash Rashid is serving a ten year jail term for causing the death of Dr Andrew Platten by dangerous driving, supplying cannabis and assaulting a 17-year-old youth and causing him actual bodily harm.

Today, Rashid, 23, of Brantwood Grove, Heaton, Bradford, was locked up for five more years for leading a masked gang that broke into father-of-three Mohammed Ilyas’s Bradford address and attacked him with baseball bats and tasers.

Mr Ilyas’s left leg was fractured in three places in the sustained assault, his left arm broken and he suffered lacerations to his head and around his eye.

Prosecutor Howard Shaw said Rashid was on bail at the time after ploughing into Mr Platten, 55, as he cycled along Cottingley Cliffe Road, Cottingley, Bingley, last July. Mr Platten died almost instantaneously when Rashid struck him at around 74mph in an uninsured and unlicensed Vauxhall Vectra while trying to escape police who had spotted him drug dealing.

Rashid was sentenced for those offences in February and brought back to Bradford Crown Court from prison to face justice for attacking Mr Ilyas.The court heard he struck him repeatedly with a metal bar outside his home in the BD9 area at 5pm on October 10 last year. Rashid hit him up to ten times before smashing up his car and breaking house windows with the weapon. Mr Ilyas suffered cuts and bruises in the assault that was witnessed by his wife.

He admitted causing actual bodily harm, possession of an offensive weapon and two charges of criminal damage.

On October 31, Rashid was part of a five-strong masked gang that smashed their way into Mr Ilyas’s home through the front door while he, his wife and their three children, aged five, three and 18 months, were present. The intruders, all wearing balaclavas, set about Mr Ilyas, knocking him unconscious with tasers and blows from baseball bats.

During the attack, Rashid said: “I told you to take the case back. You did not take it back. Now you have seen what will happen.”

The gang smashed the recently repaired house and car windows before making off in a vehicle.

Rashid made no comment to all police questions. He later pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary and witness intimidation. His barrister, Shufqat Khan, said of Rashid: “He was a very different man in 2016. He was off the rails and getting involved with drugs.”

Rashid was angry because a young relative was “being verbally harassed by a taxi driver,” Mr Khan said.

Judge David Hatton QC said Rashid would have been jailed for nine years for the offences if he was not already in the early stages of a ten year prison term. The new five year prison term is consecutive to the ten year sentence Rashid is already serving.