'Honeytrap' teenager behind bars

A teenage girl who acted as a "honeytrap" to lure a smitten 16-year-old to his death at the hands of a love rival has been locked up for a minimum of 10 years.

Samantha Joseph led lovestruck Shakilus Townsend into an ambush in a quiet cul-de-sac where he was beaten with baseball bats and stabbed six times.

The teenager bled to death after the "relentless and merciless attack" by a masked and hooded gang in Thornton Heath, south London, in July last year.

Ms Joseph, who was 15 at the time, laughed as they caught up with him, walking away as they began their brutal assault.

Her older boyfriend, Danny McLean, plunged a knife into Mr Shakilus's chest, raking it across his liver before twisting the blade.

Ms Joseph, 17, from Brockley, south London, was ordered to be detained for a minimum of 10 years.

As he lay bleeding to death, Mr Shakilus, from Deptford, south east London, called out for his mother and cried: "I don't want to die." Judge Richard Hawkins told the gang: "You left him to die a lonely death, crying for his mother."

Ms Joseph, and Mr McLean, 18, from Thornton Heath, were found guilty of murder alongside five other youths in July. They were all given life terms as Mr Shakilus's mother wept at the back of the court.

Nicola Dyer, 34, said in a statement read to the court by a lawyer: "The reality that these young people with no souls had such a disregard for life that they deliberately conspired to use manipulation to cause nothing short of destruction is absolutely soul-destroying for me. They should never again be allowed to destroy another family. I may forgive them one day, but not today."