Two 12-year-old boys were found guilty Monday of the machete murder of a 19-year-old man. Following a month-long trial at Nottingham Crown Court (GB), the jurors unanimously convicted them. The two teenagers had denied the facts and had tried during their trial to shift the responsibility onto each other.
On November 13, the two boys, whose identities cannot be revealed for legal reasons, killed Shawn Seesahai, 19, with a machete, who was with friends in a park in Wolverhampton, a city in the center of England.
The victim, originally from the Caribbean and coming to the United Kingdom to treat a cataract, was first struck in the shoulder by one of the two accused who often carried a machete with a blade of more than 42 cm on him, before being hit, trampled and finally killed again.
The murder weapon was found by the police under the bed of one of the two boys, cleaned with bleach.
The two teenagers are the youngest people convicted of murder in the United Kingdom since 1993, and could even be the youngest people to have committed a stabbing murder in the country, according to local media.
The age of criminal responsibility is 10 in England and Wales, meaning that a child over the age of 10 can be arrested and tried if they commit a crime.
The sentence will be pronounced later. Minors are treated differently from adults, including detention in specific secure centers and not in prisons.
The United Kingdom is experiencing a surge in knife violence, whether used to attack people or commit theft, and these often involve young people.
Last year, they increased by 7% compared to 2022, reaching the figure of almost 50,000 cases, and have almost doubled in ten years, according to the National Statistics Office.
The death of a 15-year-old girl, stabbed on the way to school in London last September, particularly moved the country. His alleged killer, a 17-year-old teenager, is due to be tried next November.
