Polish student stabbed in UK speaks out

The UK’s The Independent newspaper spoke to Bartosz Milewski, the Polish student who was stabbed in the neck with a bottle and beaten up in Telford, west-central England.

Milewski said he was attacked by a “gang of thugs” when he was heard speaking Polish to friends at around 1am while sharing a beer at a local park.

“They had almost gone past but then they heard we were talking in Polish and they turned around,” he told The Independent.

“They started swearing at us and asking why we were talking in Polish, saying it’s not our country and we should go.

“One of them said he had a daughter living round the corner and he didn’t want her to hear us talking Polish,” Milewski told the paper.

The Polish student said one of the attackers broke a bottle and stabbed him in the back of the neck. Milewski ran away and tried to call emergency services, but the person on the other side of the line could not understand him because he “was losing so much blood”.

The attackers proceeded to remove pieces of wooden fencing and hit the Polish man on the back of the head “with a piece of wood like it was a baseball bat”.

Milewski needed 13 stitches to his wound.

The incident is being treated as a "racially aggravated hate crime".

Several such crimes have targeted Polish people in recent weeks in the aftermath of the UK's decision to leave the EU. (rg/pk)