The past week has seen a renewed interest in the death of 18-year-old Henry Nowak, who was stabbed multiple times with an eight-inch knife while on a night out in Southampton, and, despite telling police he had been stabbed and could not breathe, was handcuffed while lying in a pool of his own blood following an accusation of racial abuse.
The suspect, Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh man, says he was racially abused by Nowak, and admits to stabbing him with a kirpan—a religious knife, which the judge says could legally carried “only for self defence” or for religious reasons—to the back of the legs ‘in self defence,’ but says he did not realise at the time that he had caused the fatal stab wound to Nowak’s chest.
Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, is also on trial and denies assisting an offender by removing a weapon from the murder scene.
Reform MP Robert Jenrick raised the case in the House of Commons last Thursday, complaining that “instead of doing everything that they can to save his life, [the police] handcuff and arrest the lad, because there’s an accusation of racial abuse.”
This is a scandal.
Jenrick has asked the Labour home secretary to “say what she’s doing to investigate the way [officers] conducted this matter,” and has 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.”
The Free Speech Union has also described the handcuffing as “a harrowing example of the mess the police are in.”
They seem more concerned about the words people say than the fact that a man had just been brutally stabbed.
And Conservative MP David Davis has criticised what he calls the “judge’s apparent direction to the jury,” noting that “carrying an eight-inch knife is illegal with very limited exceptions which do not include ‘self defence.’”
I don’t know what is happening with our justice system at the moment, and I am not alone in that concern.
The trial is ongoing.
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
