British dad killed with vodka bottle in 'blind attack' on stag do in Prague
Welshman David 'Dai' Richards was killed in September after an argument broke out between his friends and a group of German tourists.
His family described him as 'the glue of the family', and an 'absolutely amazing father, partner, son, brother, and friend'.
His sister-in-law Tammy Sheehan, cousin Gemma Thomas, and partner Jola said: 'It wasn't a fight like what I think some people are thinking – it was a blind attack.
'From the attack he actually passed away from blunt force trauma. David was talking to locals in the street when he took a blow to the back of the head.'
German national Joel Hoppe, 27, pleaded guilty to fatal GBH has been sentenced to seven years in prison and was ordered to pay £158,758 to David's family.
He said he acted in a fit of rage while under the influence of alcohol and drugs.
He told the court: 'Not a day goes by that I don't think about the late David and his children. I will accept whatever sentence you give me.'
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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Daily Mirror
3 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
'I was born through rape in a war-zone - when I met my mother I saw my face in hers'
Sexual violence is a terrible inevitability of any war-zone. Lejla Damon was born of rape during the Bosnian war. She speaks to the Mirror about finding her birth mother and discovering her roots Smuggled across a border at just nine days old, Lejla Damon knew little of her birth mother. But as she grew up, she discovered that her beginnings were rooted in conflict. Speaking to exclusively to The Mirror, Lejla tells me she is a child of sexual violence carried out during the Bosnian war. We spoke about the first time she met her birth mother and returning to Bosnia, where staff at the maternity unit knew her story before she did. Lejla was born on Christmas Day 1992 in war-torn Bosnia. Her mother had endured an horrendous ordeal. Lejla's birth mother, who we will not be identifying here to ensure her privacy, was held for seven months in a school at the beginning of the conflict. It was during this time that she was repeatedly raped and tortured. She said: 'The premise of it was to impregnate and hold on to the women for as long as possible knowing that they wouldn't be able to get an abortion and then let them go when they were too heavily pregnant.' She explains that the aim of this was 'to change the genetic makeup of a society.' So when the two journalists who would go on to become Lejla's parents met her birth mother, she was in a state of extreme suffering. Dan and Sian Damon were in Bosnia to report on the conflict for a British news broadcaster, when they interviewed Lejla's birth mother. In that video interview, Lejla tells me that, her mother said: 'I would become like the men that raped her and that if she held me that she would strangle me.' Talking to me now, she says she has enormous sympathy for her mother. She explains: 'It takes courage to give your child up for adoption no matter what you went through… she allowed me to have an incredible life full of extreme privilege.' 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For more stories like this subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Weekly Gulp, for a curated roundup of trending stories, poignant interviews, and viral lifestyle picks from The Mirror's Audience U35 team delivered straight to your inbox. But it wasn't until later that same year when she made contact with her birth mother. Lejla was able to track her mother down through the Bosnian Embassy in the UK. After finding her birth mother, the embassy connected the pair. When Lejla heard the news that her mother was found, was alive, and wanted to be put in contact with her, she said it felt 'really intense and it was amazing.' But then the practicalities of contact crept in, she said she then thought: 'I don't speak Bosnian. I wasn't just going to call'. So instead, they opted to write letters to each other, to allow one another to digest their feelings and take the time they needed to respond. The Bosnian Embassy in the UK translated these letters on behalf of the mother and daughter. 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When the news of the Ukrainian war hit headlines, Lejla says she couldn't help but think of the terrible inevitability of sexual violence. She said: 'A conflict without sexual violence isn't a thing, so there will be many different children born out sexual violence whether it's Ukraine [or] any of the conflicts that are going on [in] Sudan [and] Gaza.' There is 'no real deterrent' for sexual violence committed during war-time, Lejla says, as many perpetrators are never brought to justice. She describes how in Bosnia many victims live in the same villages as those who raped them during the war, who carry on living their lives unheeded. In this context, Lejla explains that 'justice and accountability is a real challenge' as by coming forward, victims are giving up their right to anonymity. She adds: 'Nothing really happened to the perpetrators that committed these crimes. Where is the deterrent of doing it in future conflicts?' Working with the charity Remembering Srebrenica, Lejla is an advocate for learning from the past to ensure that genocides never happen again. We discuss the on-going genocide in Gaza. There are similarities between the atrocities of the past in Bosnia and the atrocities of the present in Palestine. Lejla says: 'It's blatant annihilation, this isn't a small thing: food, withholding aid, bombing hospitals … The conflict [in Palestine] is playing out in the same way [as] the Bosnian war was not that long ago.' She adds: 'It's like we've not ever learned from what's happened previously, all the atrocities that have happened before [and] all the genocides.' Lejla says that, 'across the world there is a lot of lack of empathy.' She adds: 'Ultimately we need to do more within policy to actually take action against the countries that are committing genocide.' If you have been affected by this story, contact Rape Crisis England & Wales for free confidential support and information on 08088029999 or their website or 08088010302 if you're calling from Scotland. You can contact the Domestic and Sexual Abuse helpline on 0808 802 1414 if you are in Ireland.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
The state will do anything but fix the migrant crisis
Migrant hotel protests are erupting across the country, as 'tinderbox' Britain catches fire. What began with a series of protests in Epping, Essex, over the alleged sexual assault of a teenage girl by a recently arrived Ethiopian migrant, has now spread, as Brits air long-standing grievances about asylum seekers they have been forced to host in their own communities. A powerful tendency now exists in the British state towards displacement activity Demonstrations have so far been reported in Bournemouth, Southampton and Portsmouth, Norwich, Leeds and Wolverhampton, Sutton-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, Altrincham and even at Canary Wharf in London. With years of unaddressed anger rapidly making themselves felt, the police, pulled in all directions, are struggling to keep up. 'Local commanders are once again being forced to choose between keeping the peace at home or plugging national gaps', admits the head of the Police Federation. Still, it seems there is one thing the government is more than happy to devote resources to: trawling the internet for anti-migrant sentiment. The Telegraph reports that an elite team of police officers convened by the Home Office is set to monitor social media to flag up early signs of unrest. Working out of the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) in Westminster the new National Internet Intelligence Investigations team will 'maximise social media intelligence' gathering in order to 'help local forces manage public safety threats and risks'. If this new division was just about intelligence-gathering that would be one thing. It's true that social media is in invaluable resource for following events on the ground at such gatherings, while local Facebook groups are often where grassroots protests are organised. Yet we know that when it comes to the British state and social media, censorship and punishment for online speech is never far behind. 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As if there weren't enough threats to free speech already. This week age verification provisions in the latest stage of the Online Safety Act (OSA) kicked in, meaning that some footage of protests is now inaccessible on social media for many users. Not even parliamentary privilege is safe from the censorship regime. Katie Lam's searing April speech on the rape gangs, in which she quoted court transcripts and survivors, could not be watched on X without age verification. We are beginning to look like North Korea with rainbow flags: for the public's 'safety', footage exposing grievous failures of the British state now cannot be viewed in the UK. Little wonder, given the OSA explicitly earmarks content relating to 'child sexual abuse' and 'illegal immigration and people smuggling' as the 'kinds of illegal content and activity that platforms need to protect users from'. The Conservatives, who bequeathed us this blank cheque for digital authoritarianism, certainly need to take a long, hard look at themselves. The claims that the OSA is merely about restricting access to pornography has been exposed as a mere fig leaf. And still things could still get worse. As the Free Speech Union has noted, shortly after last year's riots, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a pro-censorship lobby group with ties to Morgan McSweeney, 'hosted a closed-door meeting under the Chatham House rule to discuss the role of social media in civil unrest'. In attendance were officials from the Home Office, the Department of Science, Information and Technology, Ofcom and other organisations. The CCDH proposals that emerged included amending the OSA to 'grant Ofcom additional 'emergency response' powers to fight 'misinformation' that poses a 'threat' to 'national security' and 'the health or safety of the public''. This would give Secretary of State Peter Kyle the ability to directly flag unapproved content to be taken down at a time of 'crisis'. Should the unrest continue this could well be coming down the track. What all this illustrates is just how ill-equipped the people in charge are to deal with Britain's problems, as The Spectator's Madeline Grant noted earlier this week. A powerful tendency now exists in the British state towards displacement activity. Spin doctors 'manage' the news. Police surveil social media. The government shuffles asylum seekers from hotel to hotel, or to HMOs, or even to privately rented accommodation (which it uses your own taxes to outbid you for). For his part, the prime minister has been tweeting about the women's football. As the unrest grows, leading politicians continue doggedly insist that Britain remains a 'a successful multi-ethnic, multi-faith country'. In reality, there are answers to the asylum hotels crisis, it's just that the government simply lacks the will to act. Large numbers of illegal migrants need to be deported, while those that are here should be placed in a secure holding facility somewhere remote. What is surely obvious by now where they should not be: in hotels, in an Essex market town 500 yards from a school; on the Bournemouth beachfront; in the London's financial district; in a Leeds suburb right next to a shopping centre. As it is, however, it seems the regime will try anything and everything before addressing people's real concerns.
Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
The ballad of broken Britain
In my corner of Bristol, alongside drug dealers, shoplifters and street drinkers, we now have our very own pyromaniac. They started small – an abandoned office chair, a clothing bank and an old telephone box – before moving on to bigger things. Half a dozen cars have been torched over the past few months, including two on my road, and, most recently, a derelict pub. The other Saturday, hearing a commotion outside, my wife jumped out of bed and flung open the curtains. The scene that greeted us was apocalyptic. In daylight, on a narrow suburban street, the arsonist had set fire to three motorbikes parked in a row, which in turn had set alight a car and a hedge. It was pandemonium. People were wandering around in their nightclothes, some barefoot, having been advised by the police to leave their homes. The bikes and car were engulfed in flames, and thick clouds of black smoke billowed over the houses. The fire brigade arrived quickly and soon had things under control, but the resulting carnage was like West Belfast circa the 1970s after a mortar attack. Setting vehicles alight is a serious criminal offence, not to mention incredibly dangerous, yet the police response was sluggish. For weeks, charred motorbike frames and the blackened shells of cars sat on melted tarmac. Wandering the area felt like disaster tourism. Eventually, after mounting complaints, a meeting was called with councillors and police in attendance. However, what was meant to be a discussion about the fires quickly turned into a free-for-all on rising crime. It was a comically British affair – lots of blustering and cries of: 'Do speak up, we can't hear you at the back!' There also seemed to be a few budding local sleuths who'd uncovered some quite extraordinary goings-on that the police were unaware of. Notwithstanding our resident Miss Marples, if we'd gone looking for reassurance, we didn't get any. Although we were told we could report incidents online and expect a response within 72 hours. Amazing. You'd hope the issue would be resolved by then. Still, there were tea and biscuits – so that was all right. In effect, the mostly middle-class crowd came away with the impression that it was down to them to manage the situation: 'You can apply for a council grant to install CCTV at your house, or buy one of those camera doorbell thingies.' The police, it seems, don't have the time or resources. One thing we were promised was increased patrols, but our local 'cop shop' is only open a few hours a week, and I don't think I've seen a policeman on foot in the 20-odd years I've been here. You do see the occasional PCSO, but they engender about as much confidence as a Boy Scout left in charge of an anti-aircraft battery. Thankfully, I recently escaped to Menorca for a week. There's very little crime, no graffiti, no litter, and the sea – a major draw – is crystal clear. The overall impression is of a laid-back, prosperous, well-run place that the inhabitants are proud of. Coming back to the UK was a kick in the Balearics due to the stark contrast. It felt like returning home to find the front door bashed in, the house ransacked and someone cooking crystal meth on the stove. Within hours, we'd seen drug deals, masked youths speeding about on electric motorbikes and drunks stumbling in the road. The usual dope smoke, graffiti tagging and filthy streets completed the picture. If we lived in a more affluent part of Bristol, or some rural idyll, perhaps the return wouldn't have hit quite so hard. But I still wouldn't have been able to escape the headlines: water company bosses pocketing millions while pumping effluent into rivers and seas; polls suggesting almost half of the public think Britain is becoming lawless; a justice system in crisis; dire public finances; a government desperate to avoid another summer of rioting. The sense – to borrow one of the Prime Minister's favourite phrases – is of a country in managed decline. Except the decline isn't being managed very well. Yes, Menorca is small and sparsely populated – easier to keep pristine. And yes, coming home from holiday is always a downer. However, the overwhelming impression was of returning to a country that had lost its way. A 16-year-old boy was recently arrested in connection with the pub fire. Dozens of cars have since had their tyres slashed, and someone took a machete to a row of saplings – so, irrespective of whether or not he's the arsonist, we're not out of the woods yet. Although, thanks to the idiot with the machete, there won't now be a wood – or even a copse. In Richard II, John of Gaunt laments: 'That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.' Hasn't it just? And, as Abraham Lincoln observed: 'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' So, while tea and biscuits may long have been a social lubricant in Britain, there are times when cohesion is so frayed, we need more than that – and I'm afraid this is one of them. To be honest, though, you'd probably get bored with Menorca after a while. All that sand – it's a bastard to get out of your shoes.
