NEW YORK — A Bronx man testified Thursday that he had no plans to pursue a criminal case against the cop who apologized for using an illegal chokehold on him — until he saw the officer’s body-worn camera video and watched as he lost consciousness.

“He choked me,” Lord Nyamah said of Officer Omar Habib. “He had me cuffed behind my back.”

“He grabbed my neck,” Nyamah said.

Before seeing the video, Nyamah was fine with moving on with his life, noting that when Habib apologized to him a few minutes after the incident, he told the cop, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to press any charges.”

“I don’t want you to lose your job,” he remembered telling Habib. “But (the cop) said, ‘I’m going to be fired anyway.'”

Habib is the first cop charged in the Bronx under a city law — passed in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop — that bars police from using chokeholds or any form of physical restraint that can restrict a suspect’s ability to breathe.

Police unions challenged the law, but the state’s highest court upheld it in late 2023.

The criminal charge for using a banned chokehold is a misdemeanor, but Habib was also charged with strangulation, a felony, and could spend up to seven years in prison, officials said.

The criminal case Habib faces dates back to July 29, 2023, when he and other officers from the 47th Precinct responded to the Eastwood Manor catering hall on Eastchester Road to deal with an unruly patron.

Nyamah, then 53, testified that, while at a relative’s birthday party, he confronted an acquaintance who had been bad-mouthing him and put his hands around the man’s neck before others broke up the confrontation. Nyamah said he went to the bathroom and punched a mirror; his hand cut so badly that blood soaked through the shirt he took off to try to stanch the wound.

While Nyamah was in the back of an ambulance, police showed up, and Habib moved to arrest him.

Body-worn camera footage doesn’t clearly show what happened, but prosecutors say Habib put Nyamah in a chokehold and squeezed Nyamah’s neck until he passed out.

“I said, ‘Why are you choking me?'” Nyamah testified. “He said, ‘No one is choking you.'”

During cross-examination, Habib’s defense attorney, Jacob Weinstein, tried to prove that several other factors could have led to Nyamah falling unconscious, including how much blood he lost by punching the mirror and that he had not eaten much food before drinking.

He even got Nyamah to admit that, as a semi-pro boxer in Guyana in his late teens and early 20s, he took several blows to the body and head, some of which knocked him out.

During his opening remarks on Wednesday, Weinstein said the body-worn camera video, which prosecutors had to slow down and freeze at points to show the alleged chokehold, doesn’t show the whole story.

“We’re talking about a moment in time, splitting a hair,” he said about the snippet of video. “But as you all know, life is not a moment in time. It’s clear (Habib) was only doing his job.”

Habib is on modified assignment, working without a gun and shield, monitoring NYCHA surveillance cameras as the criminal case against him continues.

He joined the NYPD in 2007 and is no stranger to controversy. A chokehold allegation made against him in 2017 resulted in a lawsuit the city settled two years ago for $744,000. As a result, Habib lost 30 days’ pay and was placed on dismissal probation for a year.

According to discipline records, he lost 40 days’ pay after he was accused of using excessive force for punching a handcuffed prisoner in the face in 2009.

In addition, Habib’s testimony in an otherwise solid Bronx gun case transformed a simple prosecution into a boondoggle, and ultimately led to multiple defendants withdrawing their guilty pleas, officials said.

Habib, the Daily News reported in 2020, admitted to tampering with evidence during a 2016 raid of a Tinton Ave. apartment, where he placed a seized gun in a box with money on top of it — even though no money was vouchered — before police took a picture of the weapon.

He also admitted a second gun was moved closer to one of the defendants as he lay on the floor handcuffed.

The criminal case against Habib is expected to continue through next week.

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