LONDON, Jun 6 : The murder conviction of a British Sikh man who attempted a religious defence for the weapon he used to stab a teenager to death continues to cause tensions in the UK, with Downing Street and parliamentarians among those renewing appeals on Saturday.
Vickrum Digwa, 23, was sentenced to life imprisonment after a jury found him guilty of stabbing 18-year-old Henry Nowak to death.
While British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesperson condemned “people trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division on our streets” following the conviction, British Sikh MPs issued a joint statement to stress that the murder was “not about Sikhism.”
The Downing Street intervention followed US Vice President J D Vance’s social media re-post of a video depicting police body-worn camera footage that showed the victim being handcuffed by police over Digwa’s racism allegations in his final moments during the attack last December.
Vance’s post blamed the “mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it” for the murder.
“The Nowak family are grieving after Henry’s horrific murder. They have said they do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension. We should be respecting their wishes,” Starmer’s spokesperson said, alluding to the post.
“Our politics should bring people together even in the most terrible of circumstances. That is who we are as a country,” the spokesperson said.
The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) made up of 11 British MPs of Sikh heritage made a second intervention to condemn the “horrific and senseless crime” and stress that the Sikh ceremonial knife, known as the kirpan, was not involved.
“This case was not about Sikhism, and the weapon used was not a kirpan,” reads the statement – signed by MPs Jas Athwal, Preet Kaur Gill, Satvir Kaur, Tanmanjeet Singh, Baggy Shankar, Jeevun Sandher, Sonia Kumar, Harpreet Kaur Uppal, Warinder Juss, Kirith Entwistle and Gurinder Singh Josan.
“As the court found, it was an offensive weapon. No religious protection or justification applied, and the offender was rightly convicted and sentenced… This was not about Sikhism. It was about a man carrying an offensive weapon and committing a brutal murder,” they stated.
The trial has brought scrutiny over the Sikh community’s legal dispensation to carry the kirpan, even though Digwa’s self-defence argument over the use of the 21-cm murder weapon was rejected by a jury at Southampton Crown Court.
British Sikh groups have been highlighting that the kirpan was being unfairly targeted and that case risked adversely impacting community relations. A spokesperson for the Gurdwara Khalsa Darbar in Southampton expressed fears that the community was feeling “victimised” in the wake of the incident.
Meanwhile, the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary charged six more protesters in connection with Tuesday’s clashes with police near the Digwa family’s home in the city, taking the total number of men charged with violent disorder to eight.
Officers from the police force remain under an Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) investigation amid allegations of “two-tier” policing, where one community is prioritised over another.
The allegations have been dismissed by the authorities and the IOPC also issued a statement appealing against the public “speculating on an ongoing live investigation.”
While Digwa has been sentenced to life with a minimum term of 21 years behind bars, his mother Kiran Kaur will be sentenced on July 17 for her role in removing the murder weapon from the scene of the crime in Portswood, south-east England, in the early hours of December 4 last year. (PTI )
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