A teenager broke down in the witness box today as she told how she and her friend Mary-Ann Leneghan knelt on the grass in a darkened park, waiting to be murdered by a gang of men who had raped and tortured them.
Six men are accused of stabbing 16-year-old Mary-Ann to death, and shooting the 19-year-old witness in the head.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, survived, and went on to identify five of the six men in the dock accused of the murder.
The woman told Reading Crown Court how she and Mary-Ann, her friend of 10 years, had been abducted and forced into the boot of a car as they sat in the car park of the Wallingford Arms in Reading, Berkshire on May 6 last year.
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She said they were taken to Room 19 of Abbey House Hotel in the city, where they were beaten, ordered to strip, raped, and had boiling sugared water thrown on them. She said the pair were shown guns and a knife, constantly told they were going to be killed, and heard that they would be taken to Prospect Park in Reading.
During her first day giving evidence she had hardly flinched as she recounted graphic details without being hidden by a screen.
But today she wept as she told how, as she was raped by a man wearing white jogging bottoms, another man said: “We are ready to go now, let’s leave these bitches now, come on let’s do it”.
She told the jury that she understood this phrase to mean “the final stage, that we were going to die, that they were going to kill us.”
She said that she and Mary-Ann were taken out of the boot of the car and forced, stumbling and wiping blood from her head, across the park. The pair were ordered to kneel on the ground side by side and were told to put pillow cases over their heads by two men, one wearing a bandana over the lower half of his face and the man with the white jogging bottoms.
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Mary-Ann’s father sat with his hand over his mouth as the girl continued. Asked by prosecutor Richard Latham, QC, what happened next, she paused for around 30 seconds before looking straight ahead at the jury and saying: “She was stabbed.”
The court was told that the knifeman had been the man with the bandana. Asked where on Mary-Ann’s body the man had put the knife she said: “Her upper body, her chest, her breasts, everything.”
As Mary-Ann cried and pleaded, said the girl, the man with the bandana got angry saying words to the effect of “shut up”. Mary-Ann fell in a ball on the ground but the stabbing did not stop.
Breaking down in tears, she said that the man with the bandana said to the man in white jogging bottoms that he wanted to shoot Mary-Ann because “she wouldn’t shut up”. She said that the other man replied: “‘No, that’s for her’ - meaning me”.
The man then turned to her, she said, put a gun to her head and told her: “These are going to be your last moments, seeing your friend being butchered.”
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He then asked: “Are you ready to die?”
Mr Latham said: “And then what happened?”
She whispered in reply: “He shot me.”
She said she woke up to feel “the insects and the grass on my face”, but did not move and pretended to be dead. “I didn’t think they were stupid enough to leave immediately, I thought they might be watching over, check for a pulse or something like that.”
She later got up, staggered to the roadside and raised the alarm.
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She described how more than 10 days later she was asked by police to identify the men who had participated in her ordeal. The teenager was shown pictures and managed to identify five of the men. She pointed to a picture of Adrian Thomas, and said that he was the man she had known as Redz.
She then pointed to a picture of Michael Johnson, saying he was the man who had worn a bandana and added: “He killed Mary-Ann.”
She then pointed to another photograph of a man whose name was not given and said, “that’s the one that raped and shot me.”
Joshua Morally, 23, and his brother, Jamaile, 22, both of Balham, south London, 18-year-old Indrit Krasniqui of Chiswick, west London, Llewellyn Adams of Balham, 19-year-old Michael Johnson, of Southfields, south-west London and Adrian Thomas, 20 of Battersea, south London all deny murder, attempted murder, rape and causing grievous bodily harm to the two girls.
All except Joshua Morally deny kidnap. Jamaile Morally denies a further charge of raping Mary-Ann’s friend.