An English fan was so badly beaten at the the Commonwealth Games rugby sevens final he may need plastic surgery to repair his nose, but police denied on Saturday they were slow to react.
Steve Hanson said he was punched, choked and threatened during the vicious assault during the final between New Zealand and England at Telstra Dome on Friday.
”I have a fractured nose, I have to see a plastic surgeon during the week,” he told ABC radio after being released from hospital.
”They can’t tell at the moment because it’s so swollen if it’s going to be alright or not.
”I had a scan because I had a lot of blows to the head, I was strangled, so I’ve got hand prints and bruises around my neck.”
His wife Jelena, who was sitting next to him, said a group of men attacked her husband twice as he celebrated a try by England.
”There was no security. We waited for some time for somebody to come,” she said. ”It was quite some time because he was actually attacked twice … the first fight erupted, settled down for a second and then they just went again.”
Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon said the attack was captured on a security camera but she rejected claims that police were slow to react.
”We actually saw the initial ‘fronting up’ of each other and saw it pretty much as soon as it started,” she said.
”It simply escalated before we got there [but] it wasn’t four to five minutes, my advice is that, in fact, they were there very quickly on the scene.”
Nixon also denied there were not enough private security guards monitoring the stadium. – AFP
