Attorney General reviewing sentences given to Tooting teens who killed Ekram Haque (From Surrey Comet)

Attorney General reviewing sentences given to Tooting teens who killed Ekram Haque

4:09pm Thursday 29th July 2010 in

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The Attorney General is reviewing the sentences given to the happy slapping teenagers who killed a pensioner in front of his granddaughter.

Tooting MP Sadiq Khan wrote to Dominic Grieve urging him to use his powers to appeal the “lenient” sentences after 16-year-old Leon Elcock, of Osborne Terrace, Tooting, and Hamza Lyzai, 15, of Franciscan Road, were jailed for a total of eight years for the manslaughter of 67-year-old Ekram Haque.

After the sentences were passed at the Old Bailey on Friday, Mr Haque’s son Arfan described the outcome as “a disgrace”.

But a spokesman for the Attorney General’s office said the papers with which to review Judge Martin Stephens’ ruling had been called for “in any case”.

He said: “We’ve called for the papers in the case with a view to consider them under the unduly lenient sentences scheme.”

The move could lead to the Government’s chief law officer referring the case to the Court of Appeal.

Elcock and Lyzai punched Mr Haque outside Tooting’s Idara-e-Jafferiya mosque on August 31 last year during a happy slapping rampage, while the retired care worker stood by the roadside with his three-year-old granddaughter Miriam. He died a week later in hospital having suffered “irreparable brain damage”.

The pair launched the attack seconds after targeting Atta Mir, 74 and from Ewell, and Imdad Bukhai, a 39-year-old from Thornton Heath, with another teenager, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

The 15-year-old was given a six-month detention and training order for his part in those two happy slappings and for two attacks carried out with Elcock five days earlier on an elderly couple in their 70s. His sentence will not be reviewed by the Attorney General’s office.

Judge Stephens sentenced Elcock, who was on bail for the assault on the couple when he took part in the happy slapping spree along Church Lane, to four-and-a-half years in jail.

Lyzai was given a three-and-a-half year term. However, both teenagers could be released on licence after serving half their sentences, minus nearly a year they have already been in custody.

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