This is not what Henry Nowak’s family wanted

I’ve been stabbed,” Henry Nowak pleaded with a police officer. “You’ve been stabbed…? I don’t think you have mate,” the officer replied. Having been pulled across gravel, the 18-year-old Henry can be heard saying he can’t breathe. When the police arrived on the scene, in a suburb of Southampton, at around 11.30pm on 3 December last year, instead of helping Nowak, they handcuffed him. He was arrested, while he was lying on the floor, barely conscious. The last words he heard were his rights being read. He died on the floor.

As I watched that bodycam footage on Monday night, tears came to my eyes. My own children lay sleeping upstairs. Henry’s parents have not just had to endure losing their child – they have done so in the knowledge that no one tried to comfort him. No one held him in his last moments. He would have been frightened.

I could not be as dignified as Mark Nowak, Henry’s father, has been in recent days. Standing outside court after his son’s murderer was sentenced to life imprisonment, he spoke calmly. “Henry told officers that he could not breathe nine times. He told them he had been 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 to how Vickrum Digwa was treated by those same officers was “unbearable”.

The facts are horrendous. Vickrum Digwa’s brother, Gurpeet, called 999, falsely alleging that they had been racially abused. “We just got attacked racially by some 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 whether they were alright, before noticing Henry on the floor.

Vickrum Digwa had murdered Henry Nowak, stabbing him with an eight-inch dagger that he said he carried as part of his Sikh faith. While the police were no doubt expecting something very different to what they found, their behaviour defies belief. When another officer asks Henry, “Where is it you think you’ve been stabbed?”, a voice can be heard saying, “he hasn’t been 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 made what he called an “emergency 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 of helping a dying man on the ground. “A racial slur was treated more seriously than an act of murder.”

The Reform UK leader argued that Henry Nowak’s words – “I can’t breathe” – had echoes of the murder of George Floyd in the US in May 2020. Back then, “Keir Starmer was taking the knee. Black Lives Matter exploded all over the country,” Farage hissed. This time, there was “silence” from politicians and “much of the media”. Proof of  a “two-tier culture… where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities”.

This is nonsense. Every broadcaster, newspaper and radio station in the country is leading on the story. Politicians of all stripes have commented on the awful footage. There is unanimity in the belief that something has gone wrong. It is utterly irresponsible to whip up hatred, and encourage people to respond with “pure cold rage”.

Not to be outdone by his former colleague, Ruper Lowe – who now leads Restore Britain – went further. In an incoherent, baseless rage, he asked, “how many more young British men and women are going to die?” God willing, none. It is simply not true, as Lowe claimed, that “It’s happening right now, in every city across the country.” Yet, within nine hours of posting, Lowe’s words had been viewed by 14.5 million people. Many may well believe that “children have been sacrificed to death in order to appease foreign cultures.”

This vile rhetoric has consequences. The Sikh community fears reprisals. Threats have been issued against police. One misidentified officer has been forced to relocate to protect himself and his family. “Misinformation and inflammatory commentary is making a dreadful situation even worse,” the Home Secretary said on Tuesday 2 June.

This is not what Henry’s family wanted. “We do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred, or tension,” Mark Nowak told reporters outside court on Monday (1 June). “We want his story to make our streets safer for everyone.”

Those police officers must be held to account. It is hard to disagree with Ed Davey’s verdict: this was “an evil murder made so much worse by the police response”. We must know what happened, and why. If fear of being accused of racism was a factor, we must be honest about it. And then tackle it. But no good can come of pitting us against each other based on colour or religion. 

Henry Nowak’s death was harrowing. The sound of his pleading will not leave my mind. But we cannot blame a whole community for the acts of one individual. As Henry’s father said, this is not a case about Sikhism, or racism. It’s about murder.

[Further reading: Six things we learned from the Mandelson files]