A UK court has sentenced a Briton to a minimum of 18 years in prison for the “racially aggravated” murder of an Indian merchant navy officer near a Glasgow restaurant in March this year.

Christopher Miller had stabbed 30-year-old Kunal Mohanty in the neck as the latter walked into the restaurant with his friends.

Twenty-five-year-old Miller claimed in court that the incident was ‘botched mugging’ but a jury at the High Court in Glasgow returned a unanimous verdict of murder.

Sentencing him, temporary judge John Beckett on Monday told Miller: “Your behaviour after the murder suggested that you were anything but sorry and appeared to be celebrating.”

“The murder was racially aggravated. There can be no justification for slashing the neck of someone who did you no harm... To do so because of the colour of a man’s skin is as incomprehensible as it is evil,” he said.

During the trial at the High Court in Glasgow prosecutors said the seaman was attacked because of his skin colour. Mohanty, who was due to become a father for the first time, was in Glasgow to appear for his captain’s exams at the city’s Nautical College.

The court was told that he was left bleeding to death from an 18-cm-long hole in his neck. A doctor described Mohanty’s neck injury as “one of the worst he had ever seen”.

Prosecuting lawyer Dorothy Bain said it was “an atrocity delivered without mercy, a death blow” and “an unprovoked attack on a blameless, defenceless and wholly decent man because Christopher Miller didn’t like the colour of his skin.

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