Restaurant boss jailed after hygiene offences

The boss of a Coventry restaurant where city health officials found rat droppings on the food has been jailed for 27 weeks.

Akbar Jan pleaded guilty at Coventry Crown Court to 16 breaches of food hygiene regulations at the Bab E Khybar restaurant and takeaway in Foleshill Road, according to the Coventry Observer.

It was the fifth conviction for food hygiene offences for the 47-year-old, who lives in Bradford. He was already serving a ban from running a food premises

At an earlier hearing Judge Richard Griffith-Jones described the conditions in the kitchen of Bab E Khyber as ‘disgraceful, repellent, disgusting'.

The judge had heard Jan was the senior partner in the Bab E Khyber, which he ran with 25-year-old Israr Raja.

Inspectors visited the restaurant in July last year, and despite advice given during two earlier inspections, the kitchen was in a filthy condition with grime and grease on the surfaces, rat droppings on the stored food and dead flies everywhere. Food was also stored unhygienically and at the wrong temperature.

The restaurant was subsequently closed. Jan, the senior partner who was listed as a director of the restaurant, had four previous prosecutions for food hygiene offences in Birmingham and had been banned from being involved in running any food business.

Meanwhile, at Warwick Crown Court in December last year Raja, of Dorset Road, Radford, Coventry, was given a six-month suspended prison sentence and ordered to do 180 hours of unpaid work after he had admitted a number of hygiene offences.