The Catch-up: Six-year-old's killer 'had to stop himself laughing'

What happened?

The teenager who raped and murdered six-year-old Alesha MacPhail has been jailed. Aaron Campbell has been sentenced to life imprisonment and ordered to spend at least 27 years behind bars before he can apply for parole, but warned he may never be released. The judge added that psychologist reports “had painted a clear picture of a cold, callous, calculating, remorseless and dangerous individual”.

Had to stop himself laughing

The murder of Alesha was a particularly shocking one. Campbell snatched the young girl from bed as she slept at her grandparents’ home on the Isle of Bute on July 2 last year. He inflicted horrific injuries on the schoolgirl before dumping her body in nearby woodland. She had 117 separate injuries, and a post-mortem examination indicated she had died from “significant and forceful pressure to her neck and face”.

Campbell initially pleaded not guilt but today the judge revealed the contents of a psychologist’s report in which the teenager admitted to killing Alesha. ‘All I thought about was killing her once I saw her’, he said. The judge also revealed Campbell had to stop himself laughing at points during the trial.

The killing has shocked a small island community of around 7,000 people. As Campbell was led out of the court, Alesha’s mother, Georgina Lochrane, shouted: “Disgusting, vile little f****** rat.”

Read more about this story
Full story: Teenager jailed for killing Alesha MacPhail (The Independent)
Alesha’s killer had to stop laughing during trial(Yahoo News UK)
CCTV shows killer on night of Alesha murder (Sky News)

Motorists are still using phones behind the wheel and are “returning to their old ways” despite tougher penalties, research says. The RAC said drivers did change their behaviour after the punishment for illegal mobile use was doubled in 2017, but the latest figures reveal the habit has returned. Should punishments for mobile phone use at the wheel be harsher? Read the full story (Yahoo News UK) and have your say below:

Brexit petition to revoke Article 50 tops a million signatures

A petition for the government to revoke Article 50 and cancel Brexit has passed more than a million signatures. The number signing the online petition jumped dramatically following Theresa May’s Downing Street speech on Wednesday, when she said she was not to be blamed for the crisis. By 3pm on Thursday, more than 1,000,000 people had signed the petition. The Petitions Committee confirmed the rate of signing was the highest it had ever had to deal with and they were struggling to keep the site stable. Read the full story here (Sky News)

Counter-terror police investigate attacks on Birmingham mosques

Counter-terrorism police have been called in to probe a series of attacks on mosques across Birmingham. Five mosques in the city had windows smashed with a sledgehammer during the early hours of Thursday morning, police said. Officers said the incidents were being treated as linked and although they appeared to be targeting the Muslim community, no exact motive had been determined. The investigation follows a terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, where 50 people died after a gunman opened fire at two mosques last Friday. Read the full story here (Sky News)

This is the tense moment a cheeky koala snuck into an Australian man’s car – and refused to budge. Tim Whitrow was inspecting a vineyard 40km south of Adelaide when he noticed the curious marsupial had made itself at home on his back seat.

600 million

Facebook stored millions of user passwords in plain text for years – which means they could have been accessed by its 20,000 employees. The social media giant is trying to find out exactly how many passwords were exposed and for how long. Security researcher Brian Krebs, who first reported the news, said between 200 and 600 million users may have had their passwords exposed. The company said on Thursday the issue has been fixed and that the passwords were “never visible to anyone outside of Facebook”. Read the full story here (Engadget)