LONDON, July 26 — A British judge yesterday sentenced two teenagers to life in prison, with a minimum term of 15 years, for stabbing to death a 14-year-old boy on a London bus earlier this year.
The attack in January reignited debates around gang violence and the ongoing problem of knife crime that has plagued the British capital and other UK cities for years.
On January 7, Kelyan Bokassa was stabbed 27 times with machetes on the bus in Woolwich in southeast London. He later died from his injuries, after the arrival of emergency services.
The attackers, aged 16 and 15 at the time, were arrested later that month. They pleaded guilty to the murder in May.
A judge at London’s Old Bailey court sentenced the pair to life in prison, ordering they be considered for parole after 15 years and 110 days in detention.
One boy was as a “victim of child criminal exploitation,” said judge Mark Lucraft, adding that he had faced “a history of trauma”.
The second boy was also exploited by gangs from the age of 12 and experienced “undiagnosed developmental needs,” the judge said.
“It is sadly an all too frequent senseless loss of yet another young life to the horrors of knife crime” which “no sentence of a court can ever truly reflect,” Lucraft said.
Kelyan’s mother Marie Bokassa addressed the court, asking “how can children behave like this?”
“What have the children been exposed to, to show such behaviour as this?” she added.
Shortly after the murder, the victim’s mother had told the press that her son was also exploited by gangs in the Woolwich area of southeast London.
Last year, 10 teenagers were fatally stabbed in London, after 18 in 2023, according to the Met Police.
In September 2024, a 15-year-old boy, reportedly a close friend of Kelyan, was also stabbed to death in Woolwich, in what a prosecutor described as a gang retaliation linked to a turf war. — AFP
