Hometown Seasons

Journalist Amber Haque returns to her hometown of Manchester and finds a community still reckoning with the death of Yousef Makki, a 17-year-old scholarship boy at a private school, who was killed in one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs in 2019. With Yousef’s killing and a subsequent murder trial still the talk of the town, Amber tries to understand the circumstances surrounding his death

Award-winning journalist Mobeen Azhar moves back to his hometown of Huddersfield to cover the death of Mohammed Yassar Yaqub. Described in court as a 28-year-old office clerk, Yassar Yaqub was shot dead by police on an M62 slip road on a cold and wet January evening in 2017. Celebrated by his family as a loving son and beloved father, his death led to protests on the streets of West Yorkshire, and in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement a ‘Justice 4 Yassar’ campaign was born. But with rumours of drug empires, money laundering and high performance cars, just days into his reporting of the case Mobeen realises that there is a much bigger story in town. With violence on the streets and a town that is terrified to talk, Mobeen attempts to find out where the truth really lies in a journey that forces him to face some ugly truths about his community and hometown.