💔 He Told Police He Had Been Stabbed—Four Times. They Still Handcuffed 18-Year-Old Henry As The Alleged Attacker. Newly Released Evidence Shows How A False Story Changed Everything🚨
Shocking court transcripts have laid bare the cold calculation of a killer who turned a random stabbing into a grotesque performance of victimhood, coached in real time by his own brother as an 18-year-old student bled out on a Southampton street.
Vickrum Digwa, 23, knifed Henry Nowak five times with a curved ceremonial blade in December last year. The attack was unprovoked. Henry, a bright student making his way home after a night out, never stood a chance. What followed was almost as appalling as the violence itself: a carefully constructed lie about racism that persuaded police to treat the dying teenager as the aggressor.
Newly released unedited trial transcripts, obtained by the Centre for Justice Policy, show exactly how that lie was born. As officers arrived at the chaotic scene, Digwa’s brother Gurpreet stepped in with a pointed question: “Did he racially say anything to you?” Digwa seized the opening. “Yeah he called me a P***i as well.” The claim was pure invention. Henry had done nothing of the sort. There was no racial abuse. There was no turban knocked off. There was only a young man who had been stabbed repeatedly and was fighting for every breath.
Prosecutors later confronted Digwa with the fiction he had spun. “Henry Nowak was a drunk, racist who’d attacked a Sikh. That’s what you said, isn’t it, effectively?” Digwa admitted it. “I did say that, yes.” When told it was a pack of lies, he doubled down: “It’s not the lies, it’s the truth.” The transcript captures a man fully committed to the deception even under oath.
That deception had immediate and catastrophic consequences. Officers, operating in a confusing, high-adrenaline situation and fed a narrative of racial attack, placed the mortally wounded Henry in handcuffs. Bodycam footage records the teenager insisting four separate times that he had been stabbed. He told them he could not breathe. One officer responded: “I don’t think you have, mate.” Eight minutes passed before the true nature of his injuries became clear. Henry lost consciousness before anyone fully believed him. He died an hour later, drowning in his own blood, after medical teams fought desperately to save him. An emergency doctor declared him dead at 12.37am.
Digwa’s behaviour at the scene only deepened the tragedy. He told officers the bleeding student was “pretending.” He claimed Henry had not been stabbed. When asked in court whether he recalled seeing blood after cutting the young man’s face with his sharp knife, Digwa answered “No” and “I can’t recall.” Confronted with the recordings, he conceded he had told police: “He’s not been stabbed, I don’t know what he’s talking about” and “He’s pretending.” The knife itself was a Kirpan-style blade, a curved ceremonial weapon that some initiated Sikhs are required to carry. Digwa was described in court as weapons-obsessed.
The family of the killer became entangled too. Digwa’s mother, Kiran Kaur, 53, hid the eight-inch murder weapon at the family home. She was later convicted of assisting an offender and sentenced to three years in prison.
At Southampton Crown Court, Digwa was found guilty of murder and of carrying a knife in public. Judge Mousley KC sentenced him to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 21 years. The judge did not mince words about the wider damage. “Your actions have stirred up racial tension in Southampton and across the country which have made many Sikhs worried about their own safety even though they have done absolutely nothing wrong.” He told Digwa he had brought shame on his family, his community and his religion.
Henry’s parents delivered victim impact statements that left the courtroom in silence. His mother, Lucy Ross, said the pain of her son’s death was “beyond anything I knew existed.” His father, Mark Nowak, spoke of being haunted forever by the murder and by the way his son was treated in his final minutes. “Henry did not die with dignity. He did not die with the care he deserved. He lost consciousness before anyone believed him.” The description of the arrest as “degrading” and “inhumane” hung heavy in the air.
Hampshire Police later apologised. Deputy Chief Constable Robert France said: “I am really sorry that Henry was arrested and handcuffed just before he lost consciousness.” He noted that officers faced a complicated and confusing situation, that there had been a delay in the emergency call, and that they had been lied to both in the 999 call and at the scene. Within three minutes of being with Henry, he said, officers recognised the seriousness of his condition and began first aid. The Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating.
The case ignited street disorder in Southampton despite the Nowak family’s public calls for calm. The racial element of Digwa’s false narrative had already done its work, inflaming tensions and leaving many in the Sikh community fearful of reprisals for a crime they had nothing to do with.
What the new transcripts make unmistakable is the deliberate nature of the race card strategy. It was not a spontaneous panic. It was prompted, refined and deployed while Henry lay dying a few feet away. Digwa understood the power of the accusation in modern Britain. He used it to invert the roles of attacker and victim, to buy time, and to cast doubt on the evidence of his own eyes and the blood soaking into the pavement. The “wicked lie,” as prosecutors called it, succeeded just long enough to deny a dying teenager the urgent medical attention and the basic dignity he should have received.
Henry Nowak was 18 years old. He was walking home. He was stabbed five times for no reason anyone has ever been able to explain beyond Digwa’s capacity for sudden, lethal violence. Then he was handcuffed on the word of the man who had just killed him. The transcripts do not merely add detail to a known tragedy. They reveal the calculated cruelty that followed the knife wounds, the coaching that turned a murder into a smear campaign, and the institutional hesitation that cost precious minutes.
The judge’s words at sentencing remain the most precise summary of the damage: a young life extinguished, a family destroyed, a community left anxious, and a religion unfairly tainted by association with a killer who hid behind it. Digwa will serve at least 21 years. Henry Nowak never got the chance to grow older than 18. The recordings of his final minutes, the transcripts of the coaching, and the bodycam footage of officers initially dismissing his pleas stand as a permanent, harrowing record of how a random stabbing became something even darker through the simple, cynical deployment of a race card.