GBH with intent is considerably harder to prove and carries a much higher sentence of up to 16 years in jail. For Ver-Haest, ensuring Snios was found guilty of intent and locked up for as long as possible, to prevent further attacks, was crucial.

In the courtroom, Snios was led into the dock in a grey sweatshirt and jeans. Ver-Haest stood behind a curtain to give evidence – visible to the jury but not to Snios, who sat impassive throughout, staring straight ahead, his chin tilted upwards.

Ver-Haest recounted everything that happened on 16 July: the slapping, the kicking, the jeering from the balcony:

“He’s kicking me everywhere…there was so much pain…I hit the floor again and the pain is so much worse; blinding like a flash of light.”

The video footage was shown to the court. It begins near the end of the attack. Ver-Haest is on the ground, trying in vain to get up, with Snios standing over him, with laughing bellowing over the scene from the balcony.

But it is only when Detective Constable Mark Nicholls, the officer in charge of the case, takes to the stand that what lies beneath it all is revealed.

Nicholls and the prosecution barrier read the transcript of the police interview the day Snios was arrested. It was translated from Polish.

The interview began with Snios saying he had been drinking since 6pm the previous day, and had also smoked cannabis. He confirmed that he had moved to London from Poland three years ago and works in removals.

That morning, he said: “I came across two boys who were showing me strange things…motions and movements that are typical of ladies.” The men, Adam and Ver-Haest, were “behaving like poofs”.

He continued trying to describe what he saw in the men and adds, “Let’s just call them by their names. They’re poofs…they offended me.” Nicholls asked him how they offended him.

Snios mentioned a “kiss and a hand gesture”, adding, “This is inhuman.”

Being a homosexual man is, asked DC Nicholls, inhuman?

“Yes.”

Where does this hatred come from?

“It’s not hatred,” Snios replied. Instead, he said, “It’s a deliberate provocation.”

So any form of homosexual act is inhuman and unacceptable?

“Yes.”

Did they kiss in front of you?

“No,” said Snios, adding that it’s “not normal for guys to kiss where children are around” and “I don’t have anything against them but I don’t want them showing it off.” He was, he said, “provoked”.

Snios refused to believe that Ver-Haest’s leg had been broken, denied that anyone had been shouting or cheering from the balcony, and refused to give up the names of the men who had been in the flat.

Without his cooperation and with several people there, the police were unable to find the man on the balcony.

When Snios took to the witness stand the following day, speaking through an interpreter throughout, he made an extraordinary case, using a line of defence now notorious in legal and LGBT circles: the gay panic defence.

In the 1990s and early 2000s in the United States in particular, some people accused of murdering gay men claimed they did it because the victim made a pass at them and they panicked, attacking reflexively. It worked on some occasions, leading to acquittals, which sparked widespread outrage.

In English law, this is not a valid defence. But in court, Snios claimed – having not mentioned it in the police interview – that that morning when he saw Adam and Ver-Haest they were waving and gesturing to Snios and one of them “bent over and smacked his bottom”. They were, said Snios, “trying to propose something” and that he went over to try to find out what, when a fight ensued.

The comments he made during the police interview about gay men being inhuman were, he said in court, a “misunderstanding”. Asked about the fact that he cried towards the end of his police interview, Snios replied: “I feel sorry for my children because they are hurting the most.”

His tears were not for Ver-Haest.

No one mentioned in court that Adam is straight, and that as such it would make the chances of him and Ver-Haest propositioning Snios zero. Snios’s barrister did, however, argue that her client could not be homophobic because he has twice been to gay pride.

At the end of the three-day trial the prosecution read out a statement from Ver-Haest. It described the impact the attack has had: the movements he can no longer make, the pain that still rages and keeps him awake, the medications he still has to take, the jobs he cannot accept, the fear and vulnerability he feels in public every day. Only then did Snios look ashamed.

After three and a half hours of deliberation the jury returned on Tuesday this week with a unanimous verdict: guilty.

Sentencing Snios on Wednesday morning, the trial judge, Gregory Perrins, told him: “You believed they were homosexual and attacked them for that reason. This was a crime of hate.”