The new suspect has been named as Mathew White, a scaffolder and gardener who died at 50 in 2021.

White is reported to have been a drug user and multiple offender who served time in prison at some point. One of the last offences for which White was convicted was an assault on a black shop worker in 2020 just a few hundred metres from where Lawrence was murdered.

The BBC was able to track down the victim who revealed that white attacked him while making threatening comments with references to Lawrence after he comforted him about shoplifting. 

He reportedly also threatened that he would be “Stephen Lawrenced” before assaulting him.

White pleaded guilty to the assault just a month before Stephen Lawrence’s investigation was stopped.

The murder of Stephen Lawrence 30 years ago is the UK's most notorious racist killing. The failure of the first police investigation prompted a landmark public inquiry which concluded the Met was institutionally racist.

Aged 18, Stephen was stabbed to death by a gang of young white men in Eltham, south-east London, in April 1993. He had been waiting for a bus with his friend Duwayne Brooks.

When Commissioner Cressida Dick declared the case "inactive", the BBC decided to reexamine the case, tracing witnesses, getting sight of police documents, and piecing together 30 years of evidence.

Findings revealed evidence of White’s central role in the case with several witnesses saying White told them he had been present during the attack. It was also revealed that his alibi was false, and that police surveillance photos of White showed a resemblance to eyewitness accounts of an unidentified fair-haired attacker.

One of White’s relatives also tried to blow the whistle about his involvement but wrong information was entered into the police database and the lead was not pursued.

The Met has confirmed it arrested White twice, in 2000 and 2013, in connection with Lawrence’s murder and that files were sent to the Crown Prosecution Service in 2005 and 2014. But on both occasions prosecutors said there was no realistic prospect of conviction.

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