The father of Stephen Lawrence has said he forgives his son’s killers, 25 years after they stabbed the 18-year-old to death as he waited for a bus in Eltham, south-east London.

Neville Lawrence, 78, said the decision to forgive the gang for the racist attack was the hardest one he would ever make, but that he was embracing his Christian faith and planned to spend the anniversary of his son’s death in church.

Two of the group of up to six men who attacked the teenager and his friend Duwayne Brooks because they were black have been convicted of murder, but the rest have evaded justice.

David Norris and Gary Dobson are both serving life sentences after convictions six years ago. They were tied to the murder scene by advances in forensic science. Three other men who have consistently been accused of the killing but never convicted are Jamie Acourt, 41, his brother Neil, 42, who uses his mother’s maiden name Stuart, and Luke Knight, 41.

Stephen Lawrence as a boy. Photograph: Lady Lawrence of Clarendon OBE

The initial investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s death was “marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers”, according to the judicial inquiry into the case by Sir William Macpherson.

Lawrence’s decision to forgive the killers has come after Scotland Yard admitted it had run out of leads, although it hoped that this week’s three-part BBC1 documentary, Stephen: The Murder That Changed a Nation, could result in new witnesses coming forward.

In the documentary, which starts on Tuesday night, Doreen Lawrence – Stephen’s mother and Neville’s former wife – described the killers as “idiots” and complained that “they had more rights than we did”.

In 2012, after the convictions of Norris and Dobson, she said she could not forgive them because “you can only forgive somebody when they have shown remorse and accepted what they have done – and they haven’t”.

In an interview to mark the 25th anniversary of the killing on 22 April 1993, Neville Lawrence said: “The fact that I had to lose my first child has been devastating. I can’t begin to explain the pain and the anguish me and my family have suffered over the past 25 years.”

But he said the death of his son, an aspiring architect, had triggered social change.

“When these boys killed my son Stephen, they created a legend,” he said. “There is debate about racism, there are organisations set up to help to make people understand about racism, the police have been put under the spotlight because of Stephen’s death.”



He said that he was now motivated to intervene in the recent surge in knife crime in parts of the UK, particularly London where there have been nearly 60 murders this year.

Lawrence speaks to young people to spell out the dire consequences of carrying a weapon. He said: “Right now with the violence, and the knife crime violence, it is even more urgent now that I talk to these youngsters and explain to them the pain and the suffering they inflict on families.

“My family, especially me, I will never be the person I was before Stephen’s death. Maybe sometimes people think you can just brush things aside. You can never brush this aside, this is going to live with you for the rest of your life. This is a life sentence that you can’t finish. The only time my life sentence will be finished is when I’m in the ground.”