A 14-year-old boy was stabbed to death on a London bus in broad daylight earlier this year by two British teenagers, who were given life sentences with a minimum sentence of 15 years.
The pair, who cannot be identified because of their age, were sentenced to life in prison on Friday by Judge Mark Lucraft of London’s Old Bailey court. After 15 years and 110 days of detention, he decreed that they be considered for parole.
On January 7 in the Woolwich neighborhood of southeast London, the teenagers stabbed Kelyan Bokassa, 14, 27 times with machetes on the bus. He later perished as a result of his injuries.
Later that month, the attackers, who were 16 and 15 at the time of the murder, were detained. In May, the pair admitted to killing each other.
The incident has rekindled concerns about young gang violence and knife crime, which has plagued British cities for years.
Knife crime has increased by nearly 80% in Britain since 2015, up nearly 80%.
According to London’s Metropolitan Police, 18 teenagers were killed in 2023 alone, and 10 of those fatally stabbed in London did so last year.
In what a prosecutor called gang retaliation, a 15-year-old boy allegedly stabbed to death in Woolwich in September of last year was also stabbed to death.
A teenager stabbed three young girls to death in the seaside town of Southport in August of last year, another shockwave-spreading incident that shocked the country.
The brutal reality in London is that young Black men and boys are disproportionately impacted by violence, according to Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Lee, whose team led the Met investigation into Bokassa’s murder.
Every politician, every policymaker, and everyone who wants better for young people in London should be at the forefront of their minds as we watch teenagers like Kelyan pass away, she said.
One of the perpetrators, according to Judge Lucraft, was himself a victim of “child criminal exploitation” by gangs, and he had “a history of trauma.” He continued, adding that the second boy had “undiagnosed developmental needs” and had been a victim of gang abuse since he was 12 years old.
No court sentence can ever truly reflect the horrors of knife crime, Lucraft said, “and it is sadly an all too frequently senseless loss of another young life to the horrors of knife crime.”
Marie Bokassa, Bokassa’s mother, reported to the press that her son was also a victim of gangs in the southeast of London’s Woolwich neighborhood shortly after the murder.
She questioned, “How can children behave in this manner?,” when she was speaking to the court on Friday.
Source: Aljazeera
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