Nazi thug had wanted to start a race war...but he brought people together
memory is that every morning when I get up, I’m still conscious of where these scars come from,” he said. “Lots of people say things about ‘life scars’ but I would rather they were not there. I still have eight nails in me on my spine.”
Scott has images of his injuries at the time – the burns, the nails, the skin – in a file on his computer. “I have seen them once, I have never opened them again and I don’t intend to,” he says.
Copeland, now 42, was sentenced to six life terms and is not eligible for release until he is in his mid-70s.
He had a further three years added to his prison sentence in 2015 for slashing a fellow inmate.
Scott said he has no desire to ever meet the twisted murderer. “I do not want to see him,” he says. “The man means nothing to me.
“I don’t wish him to be dead though, because then I would be lowering myself to his standards.”
He said he believes the attack on the Admiral Duncan strengthened the gay Police footage of Brixton blast community, despite evil Copeland’s efforts to do the exact opposite.
“Twenty years ago there was still a lot of homophobia around,” he said.
“Today you see two gays or lesbians holding hands and nobody looks twice. We have come a long way as a society.”
Scott is now looking towards a bright future, having recently got engaged to the man of his dreams after meeting him over a pint in a Wetherspoons pub.
“I did not think happiness like this existed,” Scott says, smiling.
“I did not want to show him my body at first, I felt embarrassed because of all the scars. But he tells me, ‘When I see you, all I see is beauty’.” THE Nazi who killed three people in a nail bombing at a gay pub 20 years ago achieved the “exact opposite” of his warped intentions, relatives of one victim say.
Today marks two decades since the third and final attack of evil David Copeland’s 13-day bombing campaign in London.
Pregnant Andrea Dykes was at the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, Central London, with her husband Julian and friends Nik Moore, John Light and Gary Partridge.
They nipped in for a drink at the
Admiral Duncan before heading to watch the musical Mamma Mia! in the
West End.
They took the brunt of the blast, which killed Andrea, 27,
Nik, 31, and John, 32, and injured 79 other people.
But while Copeland hoped the attack would heap hate on the gay community, his attack worked as a “springboard” for gay relations, Nik’s 55-year-old brother Jeremy believes.
Jeremy, speaking at home in Felixstowe, Suffolk, with his sister Carolyn Worlledge, said: “You cannot forgive what happened but it had the exact opposite effect of what he had planned.
“What he did actually opened people’s minds and made the gay community more accepted. I used to go up to London and would stand in the corner of a bar with blackened windows, feeling like I didn’t belong.
“After the attack it was different. More friends were made, more minds were opened.
“We’re human beings and people started to realise we were no different to them.”
The attacks on April 17 in Brixton, South London, and April 24 in Brick Lane, East London, were carried out because Copeland wanted to start a race war.
In Brixton, 48 were injured including a 23-month-old child who had a nail embedded in his skull.
In Brick Lane, 13 suffered injuries after passer-by Gerrard Lynch put the bag containing the bomb in his car. He was walking towards a local police station to report what he thought was lost property when it exploded.
Copeland, from Hampshire, checked into a hotel in Victoria under a false name on Thursday, April 29, assembled his bomb in another hotel the next morning and set it to go off at 6.30pm.
He entered the pub at 5.30pm, put a holdall containing the bomb by the bar, and went to a nearby hotel to watch the carnage unfold on the television before setting off on his way home. Jeremy & Carolyn