The murder last December of Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old university student in Southampton, UK, apparently by a Sikh immigrant using a long tribal knife—which in deference to that ethnic group is permitted to be carried by Sikhs in Britain—followed by the near-fatal assault of Stephen Ogilvie in Belfast earlier this month, apparently by a Sudanese man, have both led to extensive rioting in those cities and raised concerns about immigration and racial relations in the United Kingdom to perhaps their highest level.
The Nowak killing was especially gruesome as the assailant’s brother called police to report Nowak for racial hate crimes, while the mother hid the murder weapon. The assailant himself claimed to be acting in self-defense after being assaulted by Nowak following a number of ethnic slurs. Police body cameras and recording devices yielded chilling evidence of the biases and incompetence of police. They handcuffed Nowak, who had been stabbed five times with the eight-inch knife. His protests of having been grievously injured were ignored and as he was dragged to a police vehicle, he died in apparently excruciating pain while being read his rights as a defendant.
