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Police allegations against two students at a tuition fees demo were thrown out after YouTube film and photographs showed “shocking” inconsistencies in Met officers’ accounts of the incidents.

In both cases the students were wrestled to the ground, arrested, strip-searched, fingerprinted and faced charges that could have damaged their careers.

Debaleena Dasgupta, a solicitor from Birnberg Peirce who represented the men, called on Scotland Yard to investigate, adding: “The police are given immense power and malicious prosecution is one of the grossest abuses of this.”

Both arrests came as education minister David Willetts gave a lecture at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Ashok Kumar, 29, had been invited by a government official to interview Mr Willetts at the event. Police claimed Mr Kumar twice pushed an officer and blocked an attempt to stop a protester allegedly pushing a camera in another constable’s face. He was charged with obstruction.

The case against him was dropped in court after YouTube footage showed the police account was wrong and that no assault or obstruction had taken place.

Scotland Yard has agreed to pay Mr Kumar £20,000 in damages after he launched legal action for wrongful arrest, false imprisonment, assault and malicious prosecution. Mr Kumar, who was at the LSE at the time of the incident in June 2011, but is now studying for a PhD at Oxford, today spoke of his relief at being cleared.

But he said he had been appalled by his treatment and the inaccurate accounts given by police. “What was astonishing was I was sitting in court and there were officers there ready to testify that I had done something when it was as clear as day from the video that I hadn’t,” he said.

Mr Kumar said he was stopped from entering the lecture by officers. As he waited outside, he saw a teenager who was filming police being told by Pc Paul McAuslan not to push a camera in his face.

Mr Kumar intervened, to which the officer responded angrily. Moments later, Mr Kumar was wrestled to the ground by several officers. Charges were brought with Pc McAuslan claiming that Mr Kumar had pushed him twice before running off. A letter from Scotland Yard’s legal department to Mr Kumar’s solicitor states that the Met “accepts that there do appear to be inconsistencies between this footage and the notes of Pc McAuslan”.

The other case involved Simon Behrman, 36, a law PhD student at Birkbeck College who had gone to SOAS to demonstrate against Mr Willetts’s policies.

The Met paid £20,000 damages and conceded that testimony given in court by Pc Chris Johnson clashed with the evidence of photos of the incident. Mr Behrman claimed that he fell after Pc Johnson grabbed his rucksack and the protest group he had joined surged forward.

Legal papers claim Mr Behrman was then punched in the chest by another officer, Pc Thomas Ashley, before being taken in a headlock by another officer.

At his trial at Highbury magistrates’ court, Pc Johnson said Mr Behrman had been violent and had struggled with a security guard.

The case was abandoned when pictures taken by a photographer were shown to the court which the judge said “blow this case out of the water”.

The Met said that it had begun an investigation. A spokeswoman added: “Three officers are the subject of the IPCC supervised investigation. At no time had we previously received a public complaint in relation to this matter. As soon as we were aware of the video evidence an investigation was launched.”