Footballers: No racial motive for alleged attack, says judge

The judge in the Leeds United footballers' trial told the jury said there is no evidence of a racial motive in the savage attack on a young Asian student.

Mr Justice Poole said that the man who had been attacked, Sarfraz Najeib, was Asian and that there was no dispute his attackers were a group of white males.

The judge was starting his summing up in the case in which Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer, with two of Woodgate's friends, are accused of assault.

But he told the jury at Hull Crown Court: "What if anything is the significance of that? Let me tell you - absolutely none. We live in a time and a society where there is particular sensitivity to racism and race.

"But you should know the prosecution in this case has stated publicly in a pre-trial hearing that it does not suggest there was any racist motive in this attack. Nor indeed is there any evidence there was such a motive."

The judge said the prosecution said the motive was not racism but "group retaliation" against Mr Najeib.

He said the student had had the "temerity" in standing up for himself outside the Majestyk nightclub and in hitting back when he was first attacked. So the motive for the violence you are considering, the prosecution suggests, was not racism but spiteful group retaliation," he said.

He said the issue was one of a number of possible "distractions" the jury should avoid. Another was what the jury had heard about the involvement of race relations lawyer Imran Khan and the BBC Panorama programme.

He said: "Do not be distracted by any speculation about other investigations or other charges, nor by any supposed activities of the newspapers, Panorama or Mr Imran Khan or any other peripheral figure. They are utterly irrelevant and you should not be seduced into supposing they are anything other."

Bowyer, 24, of Leeds, Woodgate, 21, of Middlesbrough and Neale Caveney and Paul Clifford, both 21, of Middlesbrough, deny causing grievous bodily harm to Mr Najeib of Rotherham, South Yorkshire. They also deny affray.

Woodgate, Caveney and Clifford and Michael Duberry, 25, also plead not guilty to conspiring to pervert the course of justice after the attack.