A Southampton jury has found a Sikh man, 23-year-old Vickrum Digwa, guilty of murdering university student Henry Nowak after stabbing him with a Sikh ceremonial knife during a confrontation last December.
Southampton Crown Court heard that 18-year-old Nowak, a first-year student at the University of Southampton, was attacked while walking home from a night out. Digwa stabbed him five times with a 21cm knife, including a fatal wound to the chest.
Digwa claimed he had acted in self-defence after allegedly being racially abused and assaulted, but pathologists found no evidence that Nowak had been punching people.
Jurors also convicted Digwa’s mother of assisting an offender after she removed the weapon from the scene.
The case has sparked controversy over police conduct after officers handcuffed the badly injured teenager while Digwa falsely claimed he was “pretending.” Hampshire Police later apologised, although officers said medical evidence showed nothing could have saved Nowak’s life.
As Henry’s condition deteriorated, it is clear, and it is absolutely tragic that it took them three minutes before they started to administer first aid.
Digwa is due to be sentenced on June 1, while his mother will be sentenced on July 17.
Reform MP Robert Jenrick heavily criticised the police, and called for a debate on ‘two-tier policing,’ which he says “is doing so much to undermine respect for the police, and for the rule of law in this country.”
As Frank Haviland writes in his commentary for europeanconservative.com:
This is not an isolated incident. It is the latest confirmation of a pattern which stretches across the pond from Britain to the United States: non-white attackers can, it seems, stab, rape or even kill white victims while hurling racial epithets and still walk free or face only token consequences, because the counterclaim of ‘racism’ is treated as mitigation or even justification.
