Hampshire Police have issued a public apology after it emerged that officers handcuffed a mortally wounded 18-year-old student as he lay dying in a Southampton street — a blunder that occurred because his killer told police he had been the victim of racist abuse, ensuring the wrong man was arrested in his final moments.
Vickrum Digwa, 23, was convicted of murder at Southampton Crown Court on Wednesday after a jury found he had stabbed finance student Henry Nowak six times with an eight-inch ceremonial Sikh blade before using a false racism allegation as what prosecutors called his “trump card” — telling responding officers that Nowak had racially abused him. Officers believed the claim and handcuffed Nowak, who collapsed and died shortly afterwards, drowning in his own blood. His last words were “I can’t breathe.” Digwa’s mother Kiran Kaur, 53, was convicted of assisting an offender by removing the weapon from the scene.
After the guilty verdict, Hampshire Police’s Temporary Deputy Chief Constable Robert France said: “This is an unspeakable tragedy and I cannot begin to imagine what Henry’s family have suffered. I am deeply sorry that Henry could not be saved. I am deeply sorry that in the moments he lost consciousness, he had been handcuffed and arrested.”
The force said it had referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which is now independently investigating the circumstances of Nowak’s wrongful arrest.
The apology did little to quell a furious political reaction. Reform leader Nigel Farage told the Daily Mail: “It is the most shocking example of two-tier policing I have ever seen. Our policing system is broken, a Reform government will fix it.” Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp was equally damning: “It is shameful that the police handcuffed Henry as he lay dying, especially as he told them he had been stabbed. The police seemed more interested in cuffing someone accused of making a racist comment than in saving a dying man. Henry’s last words were ‘I can’t breathe.’ If he had been an ethnic minority there would probably be protests and riots by now.”
Reform MP Robert Jenrick had already raised the case in the House of Commons, complaining that “instead of doing everything they can to save his life, the police handcuff and arrest the lad, because there’s an accusation of racial abuse,” and calling the episode “a scandal.” He has written to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood urging a full investigation into the conduct of officers at the scene, calling the government’s silence “in marked contrast to how they responded to other incidents involving deaths involving the police.”
Both Philp and Jenrick have called for body-worn video footage of the arrest to be released in the interests of transparency. An anti-“two tier policing” protest was called for Thursday night outside Southampton Central Police Station following the verdict. Elon Musk, who has repeatedly intervened in British policing controversies via his X platform, offered to fund a private prosecution against the officers involved.
The case against Digwa had been built on a sequence of lies the court found he had told from the moment officers arrived. Nowak, who was studying accountancy and finance at the University of Southampton, had been below the drink-drive limit that night, directly contradicting Digwa’s claims that he was drunk and aggressive. Prosecutor Nicholas Lobbenberg KC told the jury that Digwa had fabricated every element of his account — including a claim that Nowak had threatened to kill him — and that the racial slur allegation had never happened. “Drunk is a lie, ‘going to kill me’ is a lie and we say ‘P***’ is a lie,” he said. “Racism was his trump card to try to make sure what he had done was lawful. We say that was a wicked lie about a dying man and it is a wicked lie about a dead man to you now.”
The Spectator noted a more troubling possibility raised by the case: that the arrest may have been an almost automatic response to the suggestion of racial abuse, and that had this simply been a fight with no racism allegation, Nowak might have been rushed to hospital rather than handcuffed. “A policy of almost automatic arrest for any allegation of a racial slur, whatever the circumstances, is a grossly one-sided use of police resources,” the magazine wrote.
Digwa was found to have been carrying two blades on the night — a small kirpan worn at his neck, which fulfilled his religious obligation as a Sikh and which he did not use, and a much larger eight-inch Shastar blade in a sheath openly displayed over his clothing. Police found 20 bladed articles when they searched his family home.
