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Michael Murphy: How Britain's anti-racism crusade caused in the death of an innocent teen

Police are told not to be colour-blind, so they believed the lies of a Sikh man over his stabbing-victim, Henry Nowak

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LONDON — “Please, brother, I can’t breathe.” Those were the last words Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old student at the University of Southampton, uttered before he died. Nowak was returning from a night out when he came across Vickrum Digwa, a 23-year-old Sikh man, who murdered him with a 21-centemetre-long ceremonial dagger in December 2025. Digwa stabbed Nowak five times as he attempted to flee, including a fatal blow to the chest, which punctured a lung and an artery. This violence appears to have been Digwa’s response to Nowak “cheekily,” as the judge put it, asking him if he was “a bad man.”

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Digwa falsely claimed, as has now been established in court, that Nowak had racially abused him. He clearly felt that alleging racism, the holiest of incantations that mobilizes the British state like nothing else, would help him get away with murder. Events would show that Digwa understood Britain’s institutions all too well, and that he was almost correct. Digwa’s family arrived at the scene and, instead of calling an ambulance for the dying teenager, his brother, Gurpreet, called the police,........

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