Mary-Ann gang jailed for life
Six gang members were jailed for life today for the “gratuitous torture” and brutal “execution” of schoolgirl Mary-Ann Leneghan.
Ringleader Adrian Thomas, 20, Michael Johnson, 19, and brothers Jamaile and Joshua Morally, 22 and 23, were told they would each serve a minimum of 27 years.
Llewellyn Adams, 24, and Indrit Krasniqi, 18, were told they must serve at least 23 years.
Jailing them at Reading Crown Court, Mr Justice Penry-Davey told them: “Drugs breed violence. Those who deal drugs show a readiness to use weapons including guns.”
Mary-Ann and an 18-year-old friend who cannot be named for legal reasons were abducted near the schoolgirl’s home in Reading in the early hours of May 7 last year.
The two teenagers were bundled into a car boot and driven to a tiny hotel room where they were subjected to an ordeal, which a senior prosecutor later likened to the horror of war crimes.
Mary-Ann was stabbed to death. Her friend was shot in the head but survived.
A jury at Reading Crown Court last month found all six men guilty of Mary-Ann’s murder and the attempted killing of her friend as well as a string of other charges including kidnap and assault.
Some were convicted of rape.
The judge today said the gang treated their victims as “bait” and subjected them to acts of “gratuitous torture” and “gross sexual abuse”.
The trial heard that the two teenagers were bundled into a car boot and driven to a tiny room at the Abbey House hotel in Reading where they were subjected to an ordeal, which a senior prosecutor later likened to the horror of war crimes.
After being drugged, orally raped and tortured with cigarettes, knives, a metal bar and boiling sugared water for three hours, the pair were driven to nearby Prospect Park to be executed in revenge for an earlier gang attack on Adrian Thomas.
Mary-Ann was murdered in a stabbing frenzy while the older girl was forced to look on, told that she too was to be killed – but not before seeing her friend “butchered“.
It emerged after the trial that Thomas, of Queenstown Road, Battersea; Johnson, of Keevil Drive, Southfields; Jamaile Morally, of Brook Close, Balham, and Krasniqi, of Oxford Road North, Chiswick, were all serving community sentences at the time of the killing.
Johnson and Krasniqi had been on community punishment orders, Jamaile Morally was on a community rehabilitation order and Adrian Thomas on a combination of both.
Krasniqi, a Kosovan national, came to Britain illegally as a child and was raised in London children’s homes but, by turning 18, had become an over-stayer by the time of the murder. He will be deported when he has completed his life sentence.
