Depth of hatred revealed in covert video

Neil Acourt brandished a knife, waved it around and thrust it into the wall or furniture uttering vile racist abuse.

"I reckon that every nigger should be chopped up mate and they should be left with nothing but fucking stumps."

His extremist views and his naked aggression were revealed in video tapes shot secretly by police and shown at the committal hearings. They provided a video nasty of racial hatred featuring Neil Acourt, Gary Dobson and Luke Knight, the three men whose trial for the murder of Stephen Lawrence collapsed for lack of evidence yesterday. Also on film were David Norris, originally charged but not committed for trial, and two others, Charlie Martin and Danny Caetano.

The video was filmed during a two-week period in December 1994 - a year and a half after Stephen's murder, after police had gained access to their shared home in Eltham, south London, and placed a camera in an electric socket.

According to the stipendiary magistrate, David Cooper, who sent the three for trial, the video showed "a deeply held emphatic and sadistic loathing of all black people".

"This is not the sly and sniggering racism which is common in many sectors of society. It is not even the blatant racism used on the football terraces."

In another sequence David Norris said: " If I was going to kill myself do you know what I'd do? I'd go and kill every black c***, every Paki, every copper, every mug that I know. I would go down to Catford . . . with two sub-machine guns and . . . I'd set on one of them, skin him alive, torture him and set him alight. I'd blow their two legs and arms off and say 'go on, you can swim home now'."

Racist abuse was triggered by events such as the success of black British athletes like Colin Jackson and Linford Christie or the Cameroon football team.

Michael Mansfield, the QC who prosecuted on behalf of the Lawrence family, said the tape revealed a motive of race hatred, showed the group carried knives on the streets, and, most contentiously, contained a sequence which could amount to a confession.

Defence lawyers accepted the videos showed "unpalatable racist attitudes".

They argued that extreme racist views were neither a motive nor evidence of murder.There was nothing to connect the men with Stephen's killing and to show the videos would so prejudice a jury there would be no chance of a fair trial.