I’ve been stabbed,” Henry Nowak pleaded to police. “You’ve been stabbed…? I don’t think you have a friend,” the officer replied. After being pulled from the gravel, 18-year-old Henry can be heard saying he can’t breathe. When police arrived at the scene, in a suburb of Southampton, at around 11.30pm on December 3 last year, instead of helping Nowak, he was handcuffed while he was arrested. The last words he heard were his rights being read.
As I watched that body cam footage Monday night, tears welled up in my eyes. My children were lying upstairs sleeping. Henry’s parents not only had to endure the loss of their child – they did so knowing that no one tried to comfort him. No one held him in his last moments. He would have been scared.
I could not be as dignified as Mark Nowak, Henry’s father, has been in recent days. Standing outside court after his son’s killer was sentenced to life in prison, he spoke calmly. “Henry told officers he couldn’t breathe nine times. He told them he was stabbed four times,” Nowak said. “Let me be absolutely clear: we hold Vickrum Digwa solely and 100 per cent responsible for the brutal murder of our son. But Henry should not have died on the streets of Southampton in police custody. The way he was treated was inhumane and degrading.” The contrast with the way Vickrum Digwa was treated by the same officers was “unbearable”.
The facts are terrible. Vickrum Digwa’s brother Gurpeet called 999, falsely claiming they had been racially abused. “We were just racially attacked by a white person,” he told the operator. Physically and verbally. They were Sikh men; someone had tried to remove their turbans. When the police arrived, the lies were repeated. Officers first checked to make sure they were OK before noticing Henry on the floor.
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Vickrum Digwa had killed Henry Nowak, stabbing him with an eight-inch dagger, which he said he carried as part of his Sikh faith. While the police no doubt expected something very different from what they found, their behavior defies belief. When another officer asks Henry, “Where do you think you got stabbed?”, a voice is heard saying, “He wasn’t stabbed.” Why were they so quick to disbelieve? Why was Henry handcuffed when he posed no threat to anyone?
At 8:00am on Tuesday 2 June, Nigel Farage delivered what he called an “urgent address” to the nation. It was no such thing. It was a cynical act that used the death of a young man to sow division. The police, he said, were more concerned about being accused of racism than helping a dying man on the ground. “A racial slur was treated more seriously than an act of murder.”
The UK Reform leader argued that Henry Nowak’s words – “I can’t breathe” – echoed the killing of George Floyd in the US in May 2020. At the time, “Keir Starmer was kneeling. Black Lives Matter exploded across the country,” Farage said. This time there was “silence” from politicians and from “many media”. Evidence of a “two-tier culture… where the rights and privileges of white people are less important than those of ethnic minorities”.
This is nonsense. Every broadcaster, newspaper and radio station in the country is on top of the story. Politicians of all stripes have commented on the horrific scenes. There is unanimity in the belief that something has gone terribly wrong. It is completely irresponsible to stir up hate and encourage people to respond with “pure cold rage”.
Not to be outdone by his former colleague, Rupert Lowe – who now runs Restore Britain – went further. With incoherent, baseless anger, he asked, “how many young British men and women will die?” God willing, none. It’s simply not true, as Lowe asserted, that “it’s happening right now, in every city across the country.” However, within nine hours of posting, Lowe’s words were viewed by 14.5 million people on X. Many may well believe that “children have been sacrificed to death to appease foreign cultures.”
This vile rhetoric has consequences. The Sikh community fears retaliation. They have threatened the police. A misidentified officer has been forced to relocate to protect himself and his family. “Misinformation and inflammatory comments are making a terrible situation even worse,” the Home Secretary said on Tuesday 2 June.
This is not what Henry’s family wanted. “We don’t want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension,” Mark Nowak told reporters outside court on Monday (June 1). “We want his story to make our roads safer for everyone.”
Those police officers must be held accountable. It’s hard to disagree with Ed Davey’s verdict: this was “a nasty murder made much worse by the police response”. We need to know what happened and why. If fear of being accused of racism was a factor, we should be honest about it. And then deal with it. But no good can come of pitting us against each other based on color or religion.
Henry Nowak’s death was horrific. The sound of his prayer will never leave my mind. But we cannot blame an entire community for the actions of an individual. As Henry’s father said, this is not a case of Sikhism, or racism. It is about murder.
(Further reading: Six things we learned from the Mandelson files)
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