A MAN who stabbed a fellow pub-goer with a large knife during a ‘brutal and calculated’ revenge attack has been jailed for 17 years.
Paul Anthony Hadikin thrust the blade into the victim’s abdomen shortly after 9pm on 3 December last year in the Temple Bar in Stopford Road.
The 58-year-old was found guilty by a jury of attempted murder in July, after the court heard how he left the pub to go home to collect a knife after an argument with the 35-year-old victim.
Hadikin returned 15 minutes later with a large kitchen knife, approached the victim, stabbed him, and left.
Returning home, he sent text messages to family members, saying in one: ‘I’ve just killed somebody.’ In another, he said: ‘Help. He is dead.’
The man survived but suffered serious injuries.
Delivering the court’s sentence, the Bailiff, Sir Timothy Le Cocq, told Hadikin: ‘You left the pub, leaving your victim for dead, which is the belief you expressed in subsequent messages.’
He added that it was ‘a matter of luck’ that the victim had survived his injuries.
‘You clearly intended to kill your victim and believed you had done so.’
Addressing Hadikin’s claims that the stabbing had been accidental, he said: ‘Clearly the jury, by their verdict, did not accept that account’.
‘It was quite clear this offence was pre-meditated,’ he continued.
‘The crown categorises your attack as brutal and calculated, and we do not disagree.’
