A Sikh man told a British court he stabbed a teenager to death accidentally after being racially abused and having his turban pulled off his head.
Southampton Crown Court has continued to hear the case of the death of 18-year-old Anglo-Polish Henry Nowak, an accountancy and finance student who, as previously reported, was handcuffed by police after they arrived on the scene of the incident and responded quickly to accusations that the knife attack victim had been racially abusive.
Nowak died at the scene in Southampton, England, on December 3rd 2025, after being placed in cuffs. He has suffered a three-inch deep stab wound to his chest, as well as four other knife wounds, which he sustained before police arrived. The chest wound cut his subclavian vein, causing blood to fill up his chest cavity, which killed him.
23-year-old Vickrum Digwa stands accused of one count of murder, and one of carrying a knife in a public place. Digwa’s mother, 53-year-old Kiran Kaur, is accused of assisting an offender over claims she removed the knife from the scene and stashed it at their family home.
The court heard Digwa’s testimony on Wednesday. Accused of an unprovoked attack against the teen, followed by denials to police and allegations of racial abuse that appear to have diverted attention away from Nowak’s wounds while he was handcuffed, Digwa rejected the sequence of events as earlier portrayed by the prosecution and said he had been attacked first.
Digwa told the jury, “to me, it seemed like he was drunk,” and said that Nowak “barged into me. I thought he had done it deliberately”. He claimed that the teen used his mobile phone to record a video, the BBC reports. The court had previously heard that Nowak had been drinking alcohol that evening, but his blood alcohol level at the time of his death was low enough that he could have legally driven a car.
The defendant said he had tried to de-escalate the situation and claimed to be afraid of being attacked. He said: “During these months, there had been a lot of attacks on Sikhs and a lot of them had been videoed as well by the attackers… I thought I had to do something because I was afraid that he was going to stab me with my own [knife]”.
Digwa said he took the phone off Nowak to stop him filming — that device was later found by police in Digwa’s pocket — and at that point Nowak started attacking him. He said: “This is when he punched me… He then pulled my turban, he pulled it off my head”.
The defendant said his turban fell off and that his hair had been pulled, and he admitted stabbing Nowak in the back of the legs and pushing him away in what he claimed was self-defence. Digwa denied stabbing Nowak in the chest and said he only became aware of this during his police interview, reports ITV.
After the stabbing, several members of Digwa’s family, including his brother and parents, arrived on the scene. The court had earlier heard that it was Digwa’s brother who called the police, that officers were not told a stabbing had taken place, and that a racist incident had taken place against local Sikhs. The court had heard a recording of the emergency call, in which the brother told officers: “We just been attacked by someone racially.”
“We just got attacked racially by some white person… Physically attacked my brother we’re Sikhs, we wear turbans, and he attacked my brother.”
In another video shown to the jury, Digwa and his brother are heard accusing Nowak of racism, and Nowak, in turn, denies this. Nowak says he has been stabbed, to which Digwa replies, “No one stabbed you bro… you’re drunk”. Digwa’s father was recorded saying at the scene, “he’s pretending” to have been stabbed while Nowak lay on the floor dying.
The knife, which was forensically linked to the death of Nowak by investigators, was found at Digwa’s home. It is claimed that his mother took it there, for which she has been charged with one count of assisting an offender.
On Wednesday, Digwa denied that this had been deliberate and that his mother had only held up the Sikh ceremonial knife for a moment while he picked up his religious items from the ground that had fallen during the incident.
The Local Southampton newspaper, the Daily Echo, reports that the court heard covert recordings of a conversation between Digwa and his brother while Digwa was in custody. During the conversation, the men discuss the alleged murder, and the brother can be heard saying, “You should say it was self-defence”. Digwa said in turn: “I am a fool, an idiot.”
The paper further reported that in earlier hearings, the Crown Court was shown footage from police-worn body cameras of the moments when officers arrived on the scene for the first time. The video showed Nowak being held up against the wall of a house by Digwa’s father, while Nowak says, “can’t breathe”.
A police officer then tells Nowak, who by this point is lying on his side on the ground, that he is under arrest on suspicion of assault. Nowak again at this point replies that he’s been stabbed, to which an unseen male replies, “I don’t think you have, mate”.
The trial continues…