4,456 words

Originally published on Substack. 

Piecing together the details of what happened on the night of Wednesday the 3rd of December 2025 on Belmont Road in Southampton might be pointless – we know the gist – but still, it is interesting to do.

Henry Nowak was an 18 year-old from Essex, of Polish descent. He was intelligent and did well at A-levels. With those, he got onto an Accountancy & Finance degree at the University of Southampton. A well-adjusted, social and ambitious young man, he was also responsible, working part-time at a supermarket to help support himself. His family said:

Henry was loved by all those that knew him. He was an incredible son, brother, cousin, grandson, nephew, friend and teammate. He was an all-round top lad and everyone who was lucky enough to share his company thought the same.

He also enjoyed sport, joining two football teams within his first term at university. On the 3rd of December, that first term was nearing its end. To celebrate, one of his teams gathered at the Hobbit pub.

At 11:07pm, Nowak left the Hobbit and began making his way home to his halls of residence – most likely Portswood House which is at the top of Belmont Road, a quiet residential street lined with big houses on both sides. He was slightly drunk from his merry-making but within the legal limit for driving. Stumbling back to halls at night… it is something that virtually every male student in Britain has done, throughout the ages. But Nowak was in modern Britain.

Vickrum Singh Digwa, a 22 year-old Sikh, lived nearby in his family’s house on St Denys Road. Oddly enough, he also worked in accountancy, being accepted by a local firm. However, his own community were wary of him; they had barred him from a temple for bad behaviour. Fulfilling religious requirements, he wore a small “kirpan” dagger around his neck, under his clothing. But he is in a Sikh order called the Nihang, for whom carrying a second weapon is customary, so he also had an eight inch “pesh-kabz” sword hanging sheathed from his waist. Aside from any religious obligations, he was “obsessed” with bladed weapons and had trained with them since the age of twelve.

On the night, Digwa had just come home from a Deliveroo shift. One report says he parked his car on Belmont Road at 11:17pm. It seems he walked some way towards his family house then went back “to fetch some curried chips” from his car.

The two men encountered each other on the pavement at number 70.

Nowak was about three-quarters of the way home. He happened to be filming a video for Snapchat at the time. In this footage, he “can be heard saying ‘hello car’ and singing to himself before yawning”. This suggests to me he was slightly drunk and tired, in a placid and light-hearted mood.

He paused filming as soon as his interaction with Digwa began, so we don’t know exactly how that happened. Digwa claims that Nowak deliberately bumped into him, then told him he “could have moved a little more”, then said “Do you think you’re a bad man? I’m from Essex. You don’t know what people from Essex are on.”

(In modern British slang “badman” means a gangster, someone who is comfortable using violence.)

Nowak resumed filming. The footage shows Digwa walking away, and Nowak saying: “Innit bad man, what bad man. You’re a bad man, say you’re a bad man, go on.”

Digwa replied “I’m a bad man”, then walked back to Nowak and grabbed his phone, at which point the footage ends.

In court, Digwa said he grabbed Nowak’s phone in response to being filmed, and that Nowak now got very aggressive, punching him, knocking off his turban, and saying “I’m going to fuck you up, I’m going to kill you.”

Digwa testified that he “did not mean to stab Nowak in the chest when he pushed him away”.

This is where Digwa’s story, plausible enough until now, falls apart. How can you accidentally unsheath a sword and stab someone in the chest with it? It also seems unlikely that an intelligent and ambitious young man like Nowak – versed in the PC ways of modern Britain – would resume filming if he intended to racially abuse a non-white person.

What’s more, in both Snapchat segments, Nowak’s tone is described as placid and light-hearted, “not aggressive or threatening”. With that in mind a completely different interpretation, based on the same footage, is possible:

He was walking along Belmont Road, hazily filming a Snapchat video, and bumped into someone. He paused filming so as to apologise. Then, bemused by the sight of a turban-wearing man with a sheathed sword hanging from his waist, he thought his Snapchat friends might like to see so he resumed filming. Slightly drunk, he engaged the stranger in “banter”, thinking he would enjoy it and play along: “Innit bad man, what bad man. You’re a bad man, say you’re a bad man, go on.”

Either way, the footage shows that Digwa did not respond well to this. I believe that, while Nowak was being jovial, Digwa was being serious, and feeling increasingly malevolent, coiling like a spring, preparing to strike.

He replied to Nowak, “I’m a bad man” then approached him, snatched his phone and ended the filming. Perhaps while a confused Nowak was demanding his phone back, Digwa drew his sword.

He inflicted three wounds: a slash to Nowak’s jaw, a stab to his groin area, and a stab to his chest. The blade punctured Nowak’s lung and cut a major vein, slowly causing massive internal bleeding.

Bizarrely, Digwa now (11:22pm) began recording with his own phone. That footage shows Nowak attempting to escape, climbing on top of a bin to jump over a fence, leaving a trail of blood behind him, while Digwa taunts him, “you’re not going to get away with this, big man” and stabs him twice in the back of his legs.

Nowak managed to jump over the fence to number 68, landing on a car. I guess Digwa walked around to join him there. At this point Nowak seems to have been overcome by his injuries and stopped fleeing. Digwa, now assured of his quarry, stopped pursuing.

The two young men now began a sort of captor/prisoner conversation. I picture them seated – one calm, one in agony. Nowak pleaded with Digwa to help him, and Digwa mocked him. Digwa even took close-up photos of Nowak, presumably admiring the injuries he had inflicted with his expert sword skills.

Footage from a home security camera has Nowak saying “I am dying” and Digwa replying “you’re not dying bro”, then a full ten minutes later, Nowak saying “you stabbed me” and Digwa replying: “No I didn’t.”

Digwa was lying to his victim. As will later become clear, he knew he had stabbed him, at least three times.

Having denied he had punished him, Digwa now explained why he had punished him: “You were recording me thinking you’re sick.”

(“Sick” in this context means tough, daring, etc. Like “badman” it derives from Jamaican slang – yet another gift of multiculturalism.)

A woman resident heard their voices outside and called the police saying she thought someone had been stabbed. Incredibly, it seems that nothing came of this call.

During that ten-minute period, Digwa not call an ambulance for Nowak. However, he did film him for a full five minutes. (I presume this is a separate recording from his earlier capture of his stabbing Nowak in the legs.) That video was withheld from the trial for being “too disturbing to be shown”.

Digwa’s brother arrived. Gurpreet was 26 at the time and himself had form for threatening people in public with a sword.

The brothers concocted a story: Digwa was a victim of racist abuse and assault by Nowak. Given later comments made between them in a police van, it is possible that at this point Gurpreet genuinely didn’t know what had happened and was simply taking his brother’s word for everything.

Whether or not Nowak knocked off Digwa’s turban, the brothers agreed he had. Digwa’s hair was in a tight bun in the footage he took after stabbing Nowak, highly unlikely if his turban had been knocked off. Either way, by the time the police arrived his hair was loose and hanging down over his face, which the prosecutor suggested he did so as to “corroborate” the story.

Gurpreet now called 999 and relayed the fake story to the police:

We’ve just got attacked racially by some White person. He’s physically attacked my brother, we’re Sikhs, we wear a turban and he’s just attacked my brother. We’re restraining him right now because he’s just attacked my brother and took my brother’s turban off. He also, he’s verbally, he’s verbally attacked my brother racially. I’m not having this as a regular occurrence, I live here, I’m not having this a regular occurrence. He ain’t fighting people, he’s racially attacking people, that’s what he’s doing. Nah, he sees some brown people, that’s what it was.

Gurpreet also explicitly denied that any weapons had been used. As a result, the police were unaware of any medical emergency and therefore did not summon an ambulance.

Either now or before Gurpreet called 999, he called their parents: father Moga and mother Kiran Kaur. They now arrived. Digwa and his mother conspired in Punjabi, and she took the sword and left the scene. (Gurpreet filmed this on his phone.) The sword was later found at their house, amongst a huge collection of bladed weaponry that Digwa had been amassing since childhood.

Now they waited for the police to arrive.

During this time, the Digwas actively prevented Nowak from seeking medical help. They were holding him down, restraining him. Gurpreet had told the police operator: “I can’t let him go until this gets sorted.” The family seem to have been determined that this White racist wouldn’t get away with abusing young Vickrum. But if they hadn’t restrained him, Nowak could have rung on people’s doorbells for help, or got to the main road and been seen by passing motorists. In fact, if Digwa had simply given him back his phone, Nowak could have called an ambulance himself.

By now it must have been at least ten minutes since he had received the fatal blow. There was a trail of blood from his escape attempt, and given his various wounds there was almost certainly blood spilled elsewhere by now, and the slash to his jaw would be clearly visible, and given that he had been telling Digwa “I am dying” even before the family arrived, he would certainly be saying the same in front of them now… yet none of the four Sikhs thought to call an ambulance for him.

Instead, they spent this time accusing him of racism. Nowak denied that and insisted he had been stabbed. Digwa replied: “No one stabbed you bro… you’re drunk.” The truth: Nowak was below the drink driving limit, and Digwa himself was the person who had struck him with a sword, five times. Furthermore, father Moga joined in, accusing Nowak of “pretending” to be injured.

The police arrived at 11:37pm. By now Kiran had returned to the scene and Moga was propping Nowak up, perhaps because that would “look better” than his sons pinning the boy down on the ground.

Moga explained to the police: “He keeps dropping down, so I am just trying to keep him up.” (Why would he keep “dropping down” if he wasn’t injured? This question didn’t seem to occur to either Moga or the police.) Moga then quickly said that Nowak had “a mouthful of blood”, which aroused no interest from the police even though it clearly indicates a serious internal injury. Instead, they took the Digwas’ word for it that he hurt himself when jumping over the fence.

Digwa himself distracted them for a while by claiming to be injured: a trivial bruise under his eye. He can also be heard in the background telling another officer that this kind of thing has happened before to him:

“We’ve been walking in the park… and multiple times we’ve had people… racist and attack us… and nothing happens.”

Nowak told the police he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe. Digwa told them he was “pretending” to be injured, specifically said “he hasn’t been stabbed”, and reiterated that Nowak had assaulted and racially abused him.

Lying on his side, Nowak told the police repeatedly that he couldn’t breathe and that he had been stabbed. The police officer replied: “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Unbelievably, the police now put him in handcuffs and said they were arresting him on suspicion of assault.

Nowak said “please, brother, I can’t breathe” (his final words) and lost consciousness. He was now motionless and unresponsive, yet they proceeded to read him his rights.

At this point a female police officer noticed that his pupils weren’t reacting to light. This, exactly three minutes after the police had arrived, was when they realised he really was unwell and they had been lied to – persistently – by the Digwa family. The handcuffs, which had been on for nearly two minutes (not one minute, as was claimed by a police chief) were removed and the police began CPR and summoned an ambulance.

Digwa was arrested for attempted murder at 11:55pm. He was not handcuffed.

An emergency doctor was also flown in by helicopter. When these medical professionals arrived is unknown, but it was a lot later than had the Digwa family been honest.

However, no matter how soon they arrived, Nowak was doomed. The sword “passed upwards through soft tissue between the two uppermost ribs, catching a lung and cutting an important vein behind the collarbone.” Access to that vein would be impossible, so “he would not have survived, however quickly he received… medical treatment.” It was a truly lethal blow, delivered by an expert in sword fighting.

Henry Nowak was pronounced dead at the scene at 00:37 on 4th December, about eighty minutes after he encountered Vickrum Singh Digwa.

Within four days, Hampshire Police had taken action against the entire Digwa family:

22-year-old Vickrum Digwa has been charged with murder and possession of a bladed article in a public place… Officers charged 52-year-old Kiran Kaur [mother] with assisting an offender.

Both Digwa and his mother have now been convicted of all the above charges.

Police also arrested a 51-year-old man [father, Moga] on suspicion of murder, who has now been released on bail. A 26-year-old [Gurpreet] was initially arrested on suspicion of murder, assisting an offender and a public order defence [sic]. Officers released him with no further action in relation to murder, but he is on bail pending further enquiries for the other offences.

It is understandable why the murder charge was dropped against both men, but I am surprised that the “assisting an offender” charge against Gurpreet was dropped. I also think Moga could have faced the same charge; he must have seen his wife taking away the murder weapon yet he stayed silent about this and told the police that Nowak was lying about being injured, even while he was having to prop him up. Are Moga and Gurpreet just incredibly stupid, unable to process incoming evidence if it contradicts what they have been told? Or is it simply that they were told by a relative? Is this the famous “clannishness” of Indians?

At the trial, Digwa maintained his innocence and insisted he had acted only in self-defence, terrified that Nowak might seize his sword from him and attack him with it. He also claimed he did not know he had stabbed Nowak in the chest until the police said it during his first interrogation.

Throughout the trial, Hampshire Police remained silent. This fuelled rage and speculation. After the conviction, they said their silence had been to avoid prejudicing the trial. However, this concern hadn’t stopped them tweeting about George Floyd nearly a year before Derek Chauvin’s trial.

After Digwa’s sentencing, a raft of new charges were levelled against the family for possession of weapons.

The wickedness of Vickrum Singh Digwa, like the wickedness or stupidity of his relatives, has been overshadowed by the behaviour of the police officers who attended. For many, it confirms long-held beliefs that the British police are hopelessly “woke”. How didn’t they immediately realise he had been stabbed?

Three things can be said in their defence:

• It was night-time. Blood spatters wouldn’t be easily visible. The trail of blood he had left was on the other side of the fence.
• Three minutes is a long time to a dying man, but not long at all in ordinary human perception
• Four angry Sikhs were bombarding them with a false story that he had got “hurt” jumping over the fence, and that he was drunk. These two factors might seem to explain his condition.

But:

• Even before Gurpreet called them, the police had already received a call from a resident of Belmont Road saying she thought someone had been stabbed. How on earth was this not combined with Gurpreet’s report to prepare the officers for a potentially more complex scene than Gurpreet had described? This failure, of police infrastructure, is surely critical.
• Upon their arrival at the scene, Moga immediately told the police that Nowak couldn’t sit up on his own
• Moga also told them Nowak had “a mouthful of blood”
• He had been slashed around the jaw. A simple look at his face should have immediately told them a bladed weapon had been involved
• He told them four times that he had been stabbed and nine times that he couldn’t breathe
• They barely checked him for any stab wounds
• When they arrived, he was literally three minutes away from death. He must have looked dreadful.

What is truly astonishing is that they handcuffed him. Even if it wasn’t clear he had been stabbed, it was clear he was in no state to cause trouble or violence, still less to run away, so there can be no justification for that.

All in all, I think the predominant explanation for the police’s conduct in those first three minutes is that they chose to prioritise racism over all else. They chose to believe a brown man had been racially abused rather than that he had stabbed a White man.

Within a day of the incident, Hampshire Police knew they had performed badly and referred the incident to the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Its investigation has been proceeding all this time (six months). Its findings must be published, because this story is dumbfounding the British public.

For unknown reasons, police bodycam footage was withheld. This also fuelled rage and speculation; the British people wanted to know how politicised, anti-white and therefore dangerous to them their own police “service” has become. A segment was finally released after Digwa had been sentenced.

Some bits of “fake news” have spread about the story:

• The police officers were all female
• They searched his phone and his father’s phone for evidence of racism
• The “kirpan” legal exemption has only existed since 2019
• In court, the judge reduced the charge from murder to manslaughter. (In fact, he gave the jury the option to find Digwa guilty of manslaughter if they couldn’t find him guilty of murder.)

I have written a separate essay about the legalities around the kirpan and about the calls to ban it.

Also, there was speculation that the officers were non-white. This always seemed unlikely to me given Southampton’s demographics and was disproven when the bodycam footage was released. However, the fact that their race was immediately a matter of concern for people indicates how febrile a situation is created by diversity. Whichever side we are on, we all know that race is a faultline constantly waiting to rupture. The result is constant latent mistrust, a population constantly expecting betrayal and sabotage by “the Other”. We simply shouldn’t be living like this.

Another facet of living with diversity is the constant threat (for White people, solely) of being accused of not liking diversity, of being “racist”. Non-whites know that the R-word has a magical effect on White people: if you apply it to one of them, his fellows will abandon and condemn him. This is why the Digwa family threw the word around very liberally:

• Vickrum to his family
• Gurpreet to the police operator
• The three Digwa men to Nowak
• The three Digwa men to the attending police officers
• Vickrum to police interrogators
• Vickrum to the jury at his trial
• Vickrum’s (White) defence barrister to the jury
• The Digwa family to the court during sentencing

Even now, some brown people are trying to use it to make White people abandon and condemn Nowak.

In court, the judge and Nowak’s family felt they had to emphasise that he was definitely not racist, as if it would mitigate his being butchered if he were!

For White people’s sake, the R-word has to be stripped of its magical power. One could argue that it, like a curse, killed Henry Nowak.

In the aftermath, some Sikhs are closing ranks. How dare White people tar them all with the same brush? Yet any incidence of White violence against non-whites is used to tar all White people. In any situation, whichever option harms White people is the one chosen. When a non-white attacks one of us, our collective outrage is used to demonise us. When one of us attacks a non-white, their collective outrage is used to demonise us.

Narinder Kaur, a notoriously anti-white Sikh woman, has voiced solidarity with Muslims against “racist” Whites. For many years I have listened to White centrists squealing that “Islam isn’t a race!” Well, how insightful does that stupid remark seem now? For clarity, on the back of this incident I have seen Sikhs characterise animosity towards them as racist. Fairly soon I expect to hear White centrists squealing “Sikhism isn’t a race!” in the pathetic hope that this will shield them from the R-word. The truth is the whole world thinks in racial terms and we White people should never have stopped doing the same. We might have always been individualistic, but only recently did we become stupid.

Now, of course it is possible that a White family could conspire against an 18 year-old boy like the Digwa family did. I’m sure it has happened, here and there. But it is much less likely to happen. And where it does happen, race isn’t an issue, nobody can suspect it of being a motivating factor, and it can’t be used to mitigate or demonise the victim or the perpetrator, or the police, judiciary and media who handle the case thereafter.

Moreover, everyone knows that race was a factor here. It was a factor not just in the mutual alienation which undoubtedly prompted the attack in the first place, and not just (as too many have concentrated on) in the actions of the police. Most of all, it was a factor in the behaviour of the Digwa family. At some level, they saw the dying Henry Nowak as “just a White guy”. They probably associated him with every resentment and suspicion they’ve ever had about all White people. In that hour he was a helpless avatar for them of the race they live amongst yet do not know, cannot know, and quietly despise.

Could a White family have treated him the same way? Yes, but their motivations would be different. Could the Digwas have had other, non-racial, motivations? Yes, but racial ones were there, making their contempt for him more likely, more real, more substantial, more deadly.

And everyone knows this. Everyone knows that, just as birds of a feather flock together, racial difference combined with Third World clannishness means that all White people are as vulnerable as Henry Nowak.

This could happen to any White guy in Britain.

Nowak was one of us. He might not have been “fully English” but it doesn’t matter. We identify with him, and we know that he suffered gravely by the nonsense that plagues us all in this multicultural dystopia. We care about him because race is real. It is so real, it probably caused his death.

If current trajectories proceed and diversity increases in Britain, how much more perilous does the situation become for us White people? What happens when the police are largely non-white, and instead of taking three minutes to wise up, they take ten minutes, or simply decide not to? What happens when the Independent Office for Police Conduct is largely non-white, and even when misconduct is clear, they simply decide not to see it? What happens when the government is largely non-white, and even though the regulatory bodies are clearly corrupt, it simply decides not to do anything about it? What happens when the political parties are largely non-white, so you can’t vote for a less Third World government? Without remigration, all of these things will happen – well within this century.

And even if all of the above paragraphs are false, even if race played no role in the motivations of anyone involved in this, and therefore we needn’t fear the Great Replacement further corrupting our societies… even then, it is certainly true that, had the Digwa family never been allowed into Britain, Henry Nowak would still be alive today.

Digwa was sentenced to “life with a minimum term of 21 years”. Nowak will never see any of those years. His family will have to spend those years wondering what the promising, happy young man would be doing by now, if he had just walked on the other side of the road that night, so long ago.

Henry Nowak’s final hour was spent listening to alien people conspiring against him in a foreign language while using English to accuse him of racism and deceit. His final minutes were spent with British police dismissing his pleas for help. His final waking moments were spent in handcuffs, on a cold December ground, while all of the above continued around him.

We should be angry and disgusted with the Digwa family.

We should be angry and disgusted with those Sikhs nationwide who are using this terrible incident to induce yet more White guilt in the native majority.

We should be angry and disgusted with the Hampshire Police who made a grotesque three-minute mistake.

But there were many more people who could have helped Henry Nowak. In all of the houses around him, there were people who must have heard his screams and pleas, people who could have rescued him from the foreigners, people who should have cared, people of his kind. For Belmont Road is 80% White.