A 15-year-old boy has been convicted of murdering a two-year-old girl who was left in his care for 90 minutes.

Demi Leigh Mahon was beaten, bitten and had her hair sheared off during the attack which left her with 68 injuries, Manchester Crown Court heard.

She was left with killer Karl McCluney while her mother went to claim a child benefit cheque in July last year.

McCluney took her to a park before attacking her at a house in Salford, Greater Manchester.

He had admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but the jury rejected this claim.

Following McCluney’s conviction the judge, Mr Justice Sweeney lifted the reporting restrictions on the defendant’s identity.

The attack on Demi Leigh was so ferocious, the court heard, that she was left brain-damaged after being punched repeatedly in the face.

Toddler’s death was ‘unavoidable’

Pathologist Dr Naomi Carter said part of her scalp was also sheared off, most likely as a result of it coming into contact with a hard surface.

Dr Carter told the jury it was neither “reasonable or credible” the vast majority of the injuries were sustained accidentally.

When her mother, Ann Marie McDonald, returned she saw the injuries he had inflicted.

She told the court during the five day trial: “I screamed ‘Why haven’t you rung an ambulance?’.

“He said ‘I never done nothing, I’ve not done nothing’.”

Karl McCluney killed Demi Leigh but tried to say it was an accident

Demi Leigh was taken to hospital where her parents were at her bedside when her life support machine was switched off two days later.

At first, McCluney tried to pretend the little girl had fallen over in the park and hurt herself, but it was clear she had been beaten.

Speaking before the verdict, her father, Gary Mahon, described seeing her in hospital.

“I knew she was going to die,” he said, “There was no way she could have lived through that, it was disgusting.”

Psychiatrist Dr Cesar Lengua said he had made an admission of guilt to a health worker: “I’m not proud of what I’ve done and everyone will think I’m a monster but nobody can ever punish me as much as I’ll punish myself.”

Dr Lengua, who was called by the defence, said the boy suffered from an unsocialised conduct disorder and had a “below normal” IQ.

He said it was clear there were “disharmonious relationships between the parental figures in this boy’s life” and family dynamics were crucial to understanding the development of his conduct disorder.

The jury heard the boy has never explained his attack on Demi Leigh but has alluded to the fact he was angry with her behaviour.

Joseph Ondieki, at the grave of his mother, who was burned as a witch

Villagers, many straight from their farms, and armed with machetes, sticks and axes, are shouting and crowding round in a big group in Kenya’s fertile Kisii district.

I can’t see clearly what is going on, but heavy smoke is rising from the ground and a horrible stench fills the air.

More people are streaming up the hill, some of them with firewood and maize stalks.

Suddenly an old woman breaks from the crowd, screaming for mercy. Three or four people go after her, beat her and drag her back, pushing her onto - what I can now see - is a raging fire.

Burned alive

I was witnessing a horrific practice which appears to be on the increase in Kenya - the lynching of people accused of being witches.

I personally saw the burning alive of five elderly men and women in Itii village.

They point at me saying - that is a son of the witch Joseph Ondieki Listen to African Perspective

I had been visiting relatives in a nearby town, when I heard what was happening. I dashed to the scene, accompanied by a village elder.

He reacted as if what we were watching was quite normal, which was shocking for me.

As a stranger I felt I had no choice but to stand by and watch. My fear was that if I showed any sign of disapproval, or made any false move, the angry mob could turn on me.

Not one person was protesting or trying to stop the killing.

Hours later, the police came and removed the charred bodies.

Village youths who took part in the killings told me that the five victims had to die because they had bewitched a young boy.

“Of course some people have been burned. But there is proof of witchcraft,” said one youth.

He said that a child had spent the night walking around and then was unable to talk the following morning - except to one of the so-called witches.

Mary Nyaboke came home to find her mother-in-law burned alive

I asked the youths whether or not people involved in this supposed witchcraft should be punished.

“Yes, they must be punished, every one,” said the first youth.

“We are very angry and that’s why we end up punishing these people and even killing them.”

His friend agreed: “In other communities, there are witches all round but in Kisii we have come up with a new method, we want to kill these people using our own hands.”

I later discovered that the young boy who had supposedly been bewitched, was suffering from epilepsy.

His mother had panicked when he had had an attack.

All too common

The village elder was dismissive of my horror, saying that this kind of thing happens all the time in the western district of Kisii.

He told me about Joseph Ondieki, whose mother had been burned to death less than two months earlier.

I found Joseph and his wife Mary Nyaboke tending vegetables in their small shamba, or homestead.

Mary told me that on the day her mother-in-law had been killed she had been visiting her own parents.

She had heard a noise and discovered the truth when she came home.

She said that in the 20 years she had been married, she had never had any reason to believe her husband’s mother was a witch.

Joseph told me he has suffered a lot since his mother died.

“I was born here, but at this stage I feel as if this is not my home any more,” he said.

“I cannot visit neighbours or relatives.

“Even when they see me standing by the road side, they point at me, saying: ‘That is a son of the witch’.

The couple fear they may be the next victims

“And when I go to town they also start wondering what has taken me there. Is it that I am going to give evidence against them?

“When I come back, they say I’ve been seen at the police station, but I’ve never been there. I’ve never reported the matter.

“If I visit the neighbours, I always fear that they might put poison in the food.

“So when I’m forced to visit, I make sure I don’t eat anything.

“If I can’t get my own food I just have a glass of water and sleep.”

I set off with Joseph up the hill towards his house, which was far from the centre of the village.

On the way we passed his mother’s house.

A neighbour was reluctant to talk to me and denied even knowing Joseph’s mother.

“Here in Kisii, people are being burned on mere allegation and most of them are old,” Joseph said.

“We now don’t have any old people in the village to consult.

“Even me I’m now approaching 50 years old - I’m afraid that they’ll come for me also.”

Warning signs

I spent three days in Kisii trying to speak to the authorities, but nobody, neither the police nor the local government officials would talk to me.

As night drew in, and it was time for me to leave, Joseph walked with me from his village to where my car was parked.

When we arrived, he begged me to take him with me to Mombasa, where I am based.

It was very difficult for me to leave him behind.

As I drove away I passed signs pinned to trees, warning witches that they would be tracked down.

“We know you by your names”, someone had typed in bold.

The sheer number of queries concerned Google

The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson’s death.

Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack.

Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.

It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.

“It’s true that between approximately 2.40PM Pacific and 3.15PM Pacific, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson and saw the error page,” said Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker.

It was around this time that the singer was officially pronounced dead.

Google’s trends page showed that searches for Michael Jackson had reached such a volume that in its so called “hotness” gauge the topic was rated “volcanic”.

The BBC news website reported that traffic to the site at 0400 BST was 48% higher than average.

Fail

Google was not the only company overwhelmed by the public’s clamour for information.

The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service.

Searches for topics related to Michael Jackson peaked at 3PM Pacific

Queries about the star soon rocketed to the top of its updates and searches. But the amount of traffic meant it suffered one of its well-known outages.

Before the company’s servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that “Michael Jackson” appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates.

According to initial data from Trendrr, a Web service that tracks activity on social media sites, the number of Twitter posts Thursday afternoon containing “Michael Jackson” totaled more than 100,000 per hour.

That put news of Jackson’s death at least on par with the Iran protests, as Twitter posts about Iran topped 100,000 per hour on June 16 and eventually climbed to 220,000 per hour.

Early reports of Mr Jackson’s death and the confusion surrounding it caused a rash of changes and corrections to be made on his Wikipedia page as editors tried to keep up with events and the number of people trying to update the page.

TMZ, the popular celebrity gossip site that broke the story following a tip-off that a paramedic had visited the singers home also crashed.

There was a domino effect as users then fled to other sites. Hollywood gossip writer Perez Hilton’s site was among those to flame out.

Keynote Systems reported that its monitoring showed performance problems for the web sites of AOL, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and Yahoo.

Beginning at 2.30PM Pacific “the average speed for downloading news sites doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds,” said Shawn White, Keynote’s director of external operations.

He told Data Center Knowledge that “during the same period, the average availability of sites on the index dropped from almost 100% to 86%”.