A gang of knife wielding teenagers who stabbed a schoolboy to death in front of hundreds of terrified commuters had lost their grip on reality after playing violent computer games, a leading murder detective has claimed.
Sofyen Belamouadden was chased by around 20 youths, one of whom was holding a samurai sword, into Victoria Underground Station in London, where he was attacked and killed at the height of the evening rush hour in March 2010.
Junior Bayode, 19, became the seventeenth person convicted in connection with the stabbing, when he was found guilty of manslaughter at the Old Bailey, last October.
Today the Court of Appeal announced he would not face a retrial for murder, meaning the lengthy court proceedings are now at an end and the background to the harrowing attack can be revealed for the first time.
The attackers were all A’level students from St Charles Catholic VI Form College in West London, with many coming from respectable middle class homes.
Only one of those involved had a previous criminal record for a relatively minor, non-violent offence.
But according to the senior investigating officer on the case, DCI John McFarlane, the youngsters turned to extreme violence after becoming twisted by computer games.
The highly experienced murder detective said: “People are playing games on computers in which people are getting stabbed and shot.
“Where is the real world? For them there is a blurring between the real world and those in the computer world. There was a blurring of the reality.”
DCI McFarlane also blamed social networking such as Facebook for allowing them to organise the showdown between the two groups of teenagers.
The previous day two set of youths clashed at Victoria Station as they travelled home from school.
A minor altercation had escalated into a fight and one youth had received a bloody nose.
But later that evening, friends of the boy who attended St Charles, took to social networking sites in order to plot their revenge.
DCI McFarlane said the use of Facebook and Blackberry Messenger, had allowed people to inflame a situation, which otherwise might have dissipated.
He explained: “In years gone by when people had an argument they went their separate ways and there was time for the situation to calm down.
“What you had in this situation was that after the fight in which the boy who got the bloody nose there was instant communication through social media – BBM, Facebook and mobile phone use. “It was not just confined to people within the two groups, it went right across London.
"Had it not been for social media - for BlackBerry messaging, Facebook and telephone usage - they wouldn't have been able to organise and get the weapons and numbers and the situation would have been able to defuse."
The following day, the only female member of the gang, Victoria Osoteku, left school at lunchtime and purchased a set of £3.99 kitchen knives.
She then handed them out to other members of the gang who used the blades to inflict the fatal wounds on Soften.
DCI McFarlane added: “It was like an infantry charge. You can’t get much better in terms of preplanning. If it had not been for the mob action, the weight of numbers Sofyen would still be alive. He was not targeted but was simply at the back of the pack when the mob attacked.”
Following an intensely complex police investigation, the Crown Prosecution Service brought charges against 20 people in what became the biggest joint enterprise case ever brought.
Five trials took place at the Old Bailey with 17 convictions resulting, including three teenagers being found guilty of murder.
The Metropolitan Police examined more than 1,000 hours of CCTV and also downloaded information from 80 mobile phones and 30 computers, in what became the biggest ever task conducted by the force’s electronic lab
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