On the night of December 3rd 2025, an eighteen year old student at Southampton University was stabbed to death in the street by a member of the Sikh community. He is Vickrum Singh Digwa. His victim was Henry Nowak. You may have heard or read about this case because it became very newsworthy - not just in England but around the world.
Right wingers and thugs jumped on the story. They didn't care a damn about Henry Nowak or his grieving family's wishes. They wished to push a warped idea that somehow this case proved that British police favour ethnic minorities above the host white community. It was all utter twaddle.
Trump's right-hand man - the odious James David Vance said of this case:-
"Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes
he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still
be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European
elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the
mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the
people who love it."
You would think that a senior American politician, trained in the law would have wished to know the facts and would also have diplomatically kept his nose out of another country's internal affairs. Maybe he would have been better advised to come out and condemn the ICE killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. But no, he wished to make right wing capital out of a tragedy, never stopping to note that the killer was born and raised in Great Britain. He was not an immigrant and besides, Britain's generally peace-loving Sikh community is long-established on this island. Sikhs contribute a great deal to our society in various spheres.
Ironically, Vickrum Singh Digwa is as British as Usha Bala Chilukuri is American - the aforementioned person being Vance's own wife!
What happened in Southampton that fateful night was tragic and I really feel for the young police officers involved. It was an exceedingly difficult scenario to deal with. It seemed at first that Henry had been the aggressor and it was not clear that he had been stabbed. Vikrum's lies added to the confusion and Henry Nowak was briefly handcuffed.
I had a close look at the judge's sentencing remarks and have picked out three sections to share. They help to clarify the awful events, what really happened. For example it is clear that by filming the situation on his phone, Henry somewhat naively riled Vickrum Singh Digwa. Not a justification by any means but something of an explanation...
HIS HONOUR JUDGE WILLIAM MOUSLEY K.C. HONORARY
RECORDER OF SOUTHAMPTON AND RESIDENT JUDGE
THE KING -v- VICKRUM SINGH DIGWA
SENTENCING REMARKS 1/6/2026
13. In Belmont Road, you and Henry passed each other. You claimed he deliberately barged into you. I am sure that was one of the many lies you have told and repeated since it happened. However, there was an interaction between you both. Henry, perhaps cheekily, made a comment, asking if you were a “bad man.” He was filming you on his phone when he said it. The tone of his voice was not aggressive or threatening but, as it turned out, a tragic error of judgment. It is a reasonable conclusion that the comment was because he had seen the large, sheathed dagger. That would have been a very unusual thing for an 18-year-old student and non-Sikh to see.
14. You moved towards him and, confidently, told him that you were “a bad man.” This was the response, I believe, of someone who thought they were being disrespected, made worse by the perceived intrusion of being filmed. You were not frightened or concerned and grabbed his phone, removing it from him. The exact events which immediately followed were only witnessed by Henry and you. However, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that Henry would have wanted his phone back, believing it had been stolen from him or that he had been robbed. That may have led to a physical struggle between you and him. In that situation, there was every need for self-restraint and control on your part. As someone who was born and raised in the UK, that should have been your focus rather than any distorted view of your religious traditions. Strong words, even a verbal threat, might have been justified but no more.
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27. Another consequence of those lies is that the attending police officers honestly believed that there were reasonable grounds for suspecting Henry had committed an offence and arrested him with the consequence he was handcuffed for about a minute before his condition further deteriorated and the arresting officer began CPR. The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident. It was dark and Henry was wearing a dark top. The entry damage caused by the knife through it, would not have been obvious. Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound and the clearly visible facial wound was not life-threatening. Henry was complaining that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become. It is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.
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But for right wing thugs and for prize idiots like James David Vance and Nigel Paul Farage - why let the facts divert you from your fascistic theorising and your shoot now/ask questions later modus operandi?
Errors such as this are all too common.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is what it was - a blunder that happened in the heat of the moment on a dark night with a lying "victim" who turned out to be the assailant.
DeleteFacts, and indeed, common decency mean NOTHING to these right wing fascist thugs no matter which side of the pond they happen to live on. Any opportunity to push their agenda is fair game.
ReplyDeleteWith Vance it's weird when you think about his wife.
DeleteThanks for publishing the report and clarifying the details. It was a tragic incident between two young people such as occurs frequently on our streets. The hate mongers have distorted the facts for their own purposes.
ReplyDeleteThe term "hatemongers" seems very apt Jean.
DeleteLiving further along the coast, this has been voiced so much locally, the anger from some is scary, some of the men who have been jailed hail from the roughest areas around here, traveling distances to Southampton to be part of the demo and the actions thereafter.
ReplyDeleteIgnorant people looking for someone to blame and excited by the adrenalin rush. In history we have seen it many times before and it is repugnant.
DeleteFrom afar I don't know the finer detail, and I know a little more now.
ReplyDeleteI am a little puzzled by the speed of getting to the point of sentencing the accused perpetrator. Ok, the incident happened last year. I don't know why we are only hearing about it now.
Pressurised situation? Surely just pressured.
Pressurised or pressured? In that context both are eminently acceptable. It's not always one or the other - sometimes it can be both.
DeleteWhy let facts get in the way of a political rant?
ReplyDeleteAre you referring to me Tigger's Mum?
DeleteIt was a shocking crime made even more so by the agitation we see online. But sense does prevail in the report of the judge. In the end we have to place ourselves in the hands of justice which has the strong backing of history. Good thing we kept all the law books.
ReplyDeleteFarage and Vance and the rest would probably not give a hoot about the judge's remarks as they had formed their own convenient right wing conclusions.
DeleteAt the risk of being labelled a far right thug, my understanding was that Henry Nowak told the police "I’ve been stabbed, I can’t breathe, call an ambulance". An officer replied "don’t think you have, mate" and handcuffed him. Only after Henry had been read his rights, as some one who had committed a racist crime, did the police check whether he had been stabbed. What a terrible failure of policing.
ReplyDeleteAs the judge said, in such a situation perpetrators may feign injury. Fortunately the confusion did not last for very long. It did not help that the killer watched while a copper performed CPR - knowing that he had stabbed poor Henry in the chest! Most of the bleeding was internal.
DeleteThanks for summarizing the case so accurately and reasonably. Not only is Vickrum Singh Digwa as British as Usha Vance is American, Henry Nowak was a dual British-Polish citizen whose father was Polish. So really, both he AND Digwa are comparably descended from immigrants.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, none of that should mean anything. The fact is, Digwa got unacceptably, criminally enraged and the police didn't immediately realize Nowak was injured. That's the root of the tragedy.
Thanks for confirming the Polish connection.
DeleteWhat a tragic interaction. The anger from so many is frightening to say the least. I've been watching the horror in Belfast. Terrible crime against that man being attacked in the street. But the response has been even more horrifying. Burning innocent people out of their homes?
ReplyDeleteSo good that thousands came out to demonstrate against racism in Belfast - and against the ignorant few.
DeleteJD Vance is a fool and an embarrassment to this country and the world.
ReplyDeleteCorrect but could he be #48?
DeleteThere you go again bringing facts into it! Much better to just have a rant about how the poor white people of this country are second class citizens. The first class citizens are, of course, the illegal immigrants who come with lies and seeking asylum, machetes, guns, sign-on scams for the whole family at the DSS office, hate for us and smirks across their faces at the money they can get, at the head of the queue and shove you backwards.
ReplyDeleteYou might say this is all nonsense. Some might think it must be wonderful (and foolhardy) to live such a blinkered life.
I have said it before, I think I live in a different England to many of those in blog land.