"In your own words, please"

A friend of mine was a witness to a serious road accident recently in which a couple of pedestrians were hurt. In due course he went to make a formal statement “In your own words please”.
All went well until he got around to the matter of one of the drivers, when he said words to the effect that “the driver was wearing a loose fitting black cloth face mask in which was a small letter-box shaped slot, and which in my view severely restricted the driver’s peripheral vision”.
The response was “You mean a Niqab”.
My friend being very precise (annoyingly precise at times) responded, “No, I mean exactly what I said, and the word Niqab is not one of my own words”.
The difficult statement continued with him insisting on referring to “the driver” not “she” on the grounds that he was unaware of the person’s sex.
He continued by saying that the driver locked the doors of the car and refused to come out whilst conducting a long conversation on a mobile phone, even after the police arrived. In due course, a bearded man arrived which my friend described as “wearing a long white garment which resembled my grandfather’s nightgown and conducted a conversation with the driver in a foreign language”.
You can take it that the politically correct police were far from happy!

My friend has now received a witness summons for the magistrates’ court. It could be quite interesting.