Schoolboy `triads' locked up

Six boys who were part of a gang who ran off laughing after their leader hacked 14-year-old Carl Rickard to death with a machete were given a total of 20 years' detention.

Clive Tayler QC, sitting at the Old Bailey, told the boys, aged between 15 and 17, that in the light of the murder of the headmaster Philip Lawrence by a schoolboy triad, "they should have learned a lesson". He sentenced four of the youths to three and a half years' detention and the other two to three years. The judge described their attack as "vicious and cowardly". Rickard was murdered outside his school gates in front of horrified fellow pupils by gang leader Nathan Brown, 16. On Tuesday, Brown was ordered to be detained for life after being found guilty of murder.