Mr Brooks described how he became increasingly fearful for his safety as the days went by. Her response, he said, was to ask “if I had any weapons on me”. Mr Brooks said: “I got the impression that the police were repulsed by the blood that was there.”PC Bethel repeatedly asked him who the attackers were “I said I didn’t know the boys. She said: `Your friend is lying there and you say you don’t know who those boys are!’”At no point during the evening, Mr Brooks said, did officers inquire after his welfare or ask if he had been attacked himself.

“I looked back and saw blood on his jacket, it seemed to be pumping out from somewhere. I said to him: `Just keep running’ and he said: `I can’t, I can’t’.”Mr Brooks, whose evidence as the key witness was discredited by police, described how he gave an account of the attack to one officer, Constable Linda Bethel. “It felt like they took me to Eltham to break my spirit,” he said.Stephen’s father, Neville, left the chamber in distress and then collapsed while the statements were being read. He later recovered.Mr Brooks, who is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, sat beside his legal team and spoke only to confirm the veracity of the statements.In them, he described how Stephen was stabbed as they were waiting for a bus home.

Stephen managed to get up and stagger across the road after him, he said.”I sensed that Stephen wasn’t keeping up with me and heard him call: `Duwayne, look at me, tell me what’s wrong’,” he said. I’m sad, confused and pissed about this system where racists attack and go free, but innocent victims like Steve and I are treated like criminals.”
In statements read out by his barrister during a highly charged day of evidence, Mr Brooks, 23, alleged that detectives stood by as his friend’s life ebbed away, insisted that they must have provoked the attack, and treated him as a suspect.He also related how, the night before he testified at the murder trial, police took him to stay at a hotel in Eltham, south-east London, close to where Stephen, 18, was stabbed to death by a white gang in April 1993 He was too terrified to sleep. “Dr Carey has given two major speeches on debt and has just come back from Uganda where debt was at the top of the agenda,” said a spokesman for Lambeth Palace.Cardinal Hume’s office said that he had “taken a very active interest in the question of debt over several years. Racist thugs killed Steve and shattered my life,” Mr Brooks told the public inquiry into Stephen’s death “I think of Steve every day.

A POWERFUL and moving account of Stephen Lawrence’s final moments was given yesterday by his close friend, Duwayne Brooks, who also delivered a stinging attack on the conduct of police who investigated the murder

“Steve and I were young black men. He personally contacted the presidents of the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of all the G7 countries and asked them to make special appeals to their governments and he went specially to Birmingham today to pray and speak about debt…”A spokeswoman for the debt cancellation campaign Jubilee 2000 said that the archbishops “will be missed on the day but have both put in a lot of time to publicise the campaign”.Faith and Reason, page 20Wright’s chance,Time Out, page 28. He organised a seminar in 1996 attended by the director of the International Monetary Fund; and he attended a meeting with the Chancellor in December… The two were invited but “pleaded a prior engagement”, a spokesman said. Writing today in The Independent, Paul Handley says that with half the world in physical peril and the other half in peril spiritually, “spending a dull afternoon in Birmingham is a small price to pay”.
Church spokesmen denied that the prelates had their priorities wrong. A senior official of Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party claimed that private soundings showed that those as yet undecided were increasingly drifting into the no camp.