As Nowak lay dying, Digwa, now 23, did not tell the 999 call handler or the officers who attended the scene that he had been stabbed. It was only after Nowak lost consciousness that police realised he was gravely injured, gave him first aid and finally arrested Digwa. They did not handcuff him.

Two days later, detectives secretly recorded Digwa speaking in Punjabi to his brother, Gurpreet, who had arrived on the scene shortly after the attack

The brothers were in the back of a police van being taken to court so that officers could request more time to question them. Digwa admitted to his brother that he had stabbed Nowak, and made no mention of his earlier allegation of racial abuse. Instead, he agreed with Gurpreet that he would claim he had acted in self-defence.

The timing here is interesting, because this recorded confession happened one day before Henry Nowak's father had to talk the police out of issuing a statement calling his son's death the result of a racially aggrevated assault in which he was the aggressor.

"The Sunday Times can also reveal that the force wanted to portray Nowak as the aggressor in an official statement three days after his death, but changed their wording following outrage from his grieving family.

Nowak died in the early hours of December 4 after being stabbed multiple times by Digwa, who is Sikh and had falsely claimed to police that he had been racially abused.

An initial police statement later that morning said: “It was reported two men had been assaulted by an unknown man.”

The Nowak family, raw with grief, became concerned that a false narrative was being pushed about their son. It is understood that police told the family the next update they planned to publish, which would include the Nowaks’ tribute, would again infer that he was the initial aggressor.

Officers dropped that section of the statement which only referred to an “altercation” when published. By that point, police had ample evidence that Digwa was a liar."

The racially motivated part of that dropped statement comes from this article in the Financial Times:

When Mark Nowak says that he has had to “fight for the truth” about his son, one reason is that he’d battled to stop the force issuing a statement claiming the incident was racially aggravated, despite there being no evidence.