Damilola killers jailed for 8 years each

LONDON - Two brothers were jailed for 8 years each overnight (NZ time) for the killing of Nigerian schoolboy Damilola Taylor, after a six-year investigation marred by legal and forensic blunders.

Danny Preddie, 18, and Ricky Preddie, 19, from Peckham, south London, were convicted in August of the manslaughter of 10-year-old Taylor who died after being stabbed in the leg with a broken bottle.

He bled to death on the stairwell of a run-down housing estate in November 2000, just months after arriving in the country.

"This has been a catalogue of failures," said Damilola's father Richard speaking outside court following the sentencing.

"Failure by the system to keep these young people in school and off the streets from committing crime, failure by their mentors to give them good direction, failure by those in charge to control them, failure by the authorities to catch them sooner."

The Preddie brothers, who were 12 and 13 at the time of the killing, had both denied manslaughter at the Old Bailey.

But Justice John Goldring said during sentencing: "Each of you was closely involved in the attack. The victim, who must have been bleeding profusely, was simply left to die."

He said he could not jail the pair, who have convictions for crimes like robbery and assault, for longer because they had been cleared of murder and because of their age at the time of Damilola's death.

Both were handcuffed for fear of a repeat of the outbursts that marked their conviction.

The verdicts came after three high-profile trials and a long and difficult investigation by London police.

Four other youths were originally charged with murder but were cleared at a trial in 2002 that collapsed after the judge dismissed the evidence of the key witness, a teenage girl known as "Bromley", who was labelled a fantasist by the defence.

The Preddie brothers, who had been on bail at the time of the killing, were amongst the first suspects to be arrested for the crime in the weeks after the attack but they were later released without charge.

They were only re-arrested after new forensic evidence came to light. Blood traces found on the suspects' clothing, had been missed at the time of the killing by the Home Office's Forensic Science Service.

Detective Superintendent Nick Ephgrave, who took over the running of the investigation at the end of the first trial, asked a different laboratory, run by private firm Forensic Alliance, to re-examine all the items in the case.

The lab found that a bloodstain on a shoe, easily visible to the human eye, had been missed, along with blood drops and fibres on the suspects' other clothes.

The Preddie brothers were cleared of murdering Taylor by a jury in April, but a retrial was ordered after that jury failed to reach a verdict on the lesser, manslaughter charges.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates described the case as a "painful episode" for the Metropolitan Police.

The police investigation alone into the killing has cost almost 4 million pounds.

The government has ordered an independent inquiry into what went wrong.

- REUTERS