Killer's mother jailed for removing murder weapon in Henry Nowak case

On a December night in Southampton, an 18-year-old university student named Henry Nowak was stabbed five times on his way home from a night out. The blade that killed him—a 21-centimeter knife—never should have left the scene. But within hours, Vickrum Digwa, the man who wielded it, handed the weapon to his mother. Kiran Kaur took that knife into her home and buried it among more than twenty other weapons in her son's bedroom, a deliberate act of concealment that delayed its discovery by a full week. On Thursday, she was sentenced to three years in prison for that decision.

Kaur, 53, was convicted in May of assisting an offender. The prosecution had called her actions "criminality of the highest order," and the judge, William Mousley KC, did not dispute the gravity of what she had done. But he also acknowledged something more complicated: that her motive was not greed or malice, but a mother's instinct to protect her son. "A responsible parent would have challenged their son," Mousley told her from the bench, "and asked their child to do the right thing." Instead, she had chosen to hide the evidence. By placing the murder weapon among a larger collection of ceremonial and other blades, she had made it harder for anyone to identify what it had been used for. The judge sentenced her anyway, saying that the seriousness of her crime demanded punishment, and that others in similar circumstances needed to understand the cost of obstruction.

Digwa himself had been sentenced to life in June with a minimum of 21 years. The trial revealed that Nowak, a first-year student from Essex, had been walking back to his university accommodation after an evening out. He had consumed alcohol, though not enough to impair his judgment by legal standards. Digwa claimed he had acted in self-defense, telling police that Nowak had racially abused him and knocked off his turban. He said he had been injured. But a transcript obtained by the BBC recorded Digwa admitting to his brother in the back of a police van that he had stabbed the teenager multiple times. The Sikh Federation later clarified that the blade Digwa carried was not a kirpan, the religious knife permitted in his faith.

What happened after Nowak fell became its own tragedy. Police bodycam footage, released with the family's permission, showed officers arriving at the scene to find the teenager on the ground. Nowak can be heard saying "I've been stabbed" and "I can't breathe" repeatedly. The footage shows officers turning him onto his side and handcuffing his hands behind his back. Within minutes, he became unresponsive. An officer then told him he was under arrest for assault. Two police officers are now under investigation for potential gross misconduct. Hampshire Police has apologized to the Nowak family for the way their son was treated in his final moments.

Henry's father, Mark Nowak, read a statement outside court in June comparing his son's treatment to what he called the "decency" shown to his murderer. The family has said they remain "incredibly disappointed" and have vowed to continue their campaign for justice. They are pushing for investigations to be thorough and for the government to implement changes they believe Henry's death demands. The case has already sparked wider scrutiny: the attorney general's office has referred Digwa's sentence to the Court of Appeal under the unduly lenient sentence scheme, and Digwa himself is seeking to appeal his conviction. A full inquest into Nowak's death is scheduled for Winchester next year. The release of the bodycam footage also triggered protests in Southampton, during which more than twenty people have been sentenced for disorder that left twelve police officers and a police dog injured.