AN award-winning novelist and academic claims she was “treated like a criminal” by police after being the victim of a racist attack in Belsize Park. 

Sunny Singh, 45, was walking home with her brother and a friend following a night out in Tufnell Park on Friday when they were approached by a man acting aggressively.

She says he shouted racial slurs at the group, who were on their way back from a Bollywood-themed Club Kali event, before chasing them down Fleet Road. 

Ms Singh, a senior English lecturer at London Metropolitan University, told the New Journal how, as they had tried to discuss a plan of escape between themselves in Hindi, the man told them: “This is England, speak in English”, before adding, “I hope your families die in drone attacks”, “Paki c****” and “Paki b****** suck my d***”.

The man then punched Ms Singh’s brother, splitting his lip open, before running away. The group  rang the police who arrived at the scene in a car shortly after.

Belsize Park resident Ms Singh, who moved to London in 2005 after working as a journalist in Mexico, Chile and South Africa, said they were “shocked and upset” to find that the officers were “aggressive” towards them, accusing her brother of being drunk, criticising them for being 50 yards away from the scene of the incident, and refusing to let her and her female friend sit in the car for “insurance reasons”.

She said it had destroyed her “confidence” in the Met’s commitment to helping victims of racism.

“They were aggressive and unpleasant, they treated us like the criminals,” said Ms Singh. “The second thing they did, after criticising us for being in the wrong place, was say aggressively, ‘You get in the car’, to my brother, who was covered in blood and required stitches. At that point, we were absolutely terrified. We said, ‘Hang on, we’re the victims here’. And they said: ‘Fine, we’ll do it your way, we’ll just stand around, and the man will not be caught’. I couldn’t believe how they were treating us.”

Ms Singh said that after they returned from looking for the suspect the officers insisted that they took racist attacks “very seriously”.

“Frankly, I have very little confidence,” she said. Ms Singh said that after returning home, she and her brother Siddharth Singh, 32, a City worker, decided to post their experience on Twitter – and were shocked at the outpouring of anger at their treatment. 

“If it had not been picked up on social media this would have been another forgotten incident of sweeping racism under the carpet,” she said. 

The writer, whose debut novel Nani’s Book of Suicides won the inaugural Mar de Letras prize in 2003, added: “We could go on thinking London is a multicultural place with no racism and we have police who take racist assaults very seriously, but now I think that it is all massaged. I moved here just a week or so after 7/7 [terrorism attacks] and what struck me was how friendly and absolutely amazing the police were at the time. I remember feeling safe and welcomed and not racially profiled.” 

A spokeswoman for Camden Police said no arrests had been made but that the incident was being treated as a racially aggravated assault. 

“These incidents of racial abuse are given specialist police attention and investigated by officers from the Community Safety Unit,” the spokeswoman added. “We are able to offer additional support from officers from a similar ethnic background and link in with partnership agencies to support the victim and his friends. The focus of this enquiry is now in identify the suspect.”

• Witnesses are being urged to call 101, quoting crime reference 2311915/14, or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.