- guardian.co.uk, Monday June 19 2000 17.08 BST
Glyne Agard, who is black, his brother and a friend were attacked by an eight-strong gang as they left the Reflections nightclub.
Detective Superintendent Gary Chatfield of Wiltshire police said that the three men had been racially abused before being beaten as they left the nightspot shortly before 3am.
Mr Agard, 34, from Reading, Berkshire, is understood to have been kicked and punched as he lay unconscious. Paramedics were unable to revive him and he was pronounced dead at the scene. A post mortem examination showed that he died from head injuries.
His brother Stephen, 32, also from Reading, was yesterday in a stable condition in the Royal United hospital, Bath, with head, neck and chest injuries. The third man attacked suffered concussion and was released yesterday.
Glyne and Stephen Agard and their friend had apparently been the subject of racial taunts in the nightclub before the attack happened.
Police arrested four men, three of them soldiers, who were being questioned last night.
An army spokesman said: "There are three serving soldiers under arrest who are helping police with their inquiries." He would not reveal to which unit the soldiers belonged but said they were based in Wiltshire.
Detectives are now studying closed-circuit TV footage from the club. More than 100 officers are working on the case in conjunction with the Wiltshire racial equality council.
Wiltshire police described the attack as "racially-moti vated, brutal and unprovoked". Mr Chatfield said: "We have spoken to his parents and his girlfriend and family. They are clearly distressed by events that have unfolded."
Westbury, with a population of 16,000, is normally a haven for tourists and pensioners with one of the lowest crime rates in Britain. But one Wiltshire police officer, Det Supt Martin Abbott, conceded that number of reported race crimes had doubled in the past year in Wiltshire.
He said: "We don't have a high population of black people in Wiltshire, but whether that's the reason we don't have a great number of incidents, I couldn't say."
The chairman of the commission for racial equality, Gurbux Singh, said recently that the latest figures showed the number of racist incidents in London alone was greater than for the whole of Britain in the previous 12 months.
Scotland Yard said that race hate crimes had doubled in London to an average of 63 a day in the 12 months to April. The total, 23,346, of which 14,699 were violent offences, compared with 23,049 recorded across the entire country in the 12 months to April 1999.
The sharp increase is not confined to the capital, where the bulk of racial crime is committed. West Midlands police said that so far this year there had been 1,500 incidents recorded, compared with a total of 1,000 in 1998-9.
Scotland Yard figures also showed that eight out of 10 racial incidents were unsolved, although this year's clear-up rate of 21% was double that of the previous year.
The rise has come as a disappointment in the wake of Sir William Macpherson's report on police investigation of race crimes, following the botched inquiry into the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993.
