Killer who stabbed eight at random in knife rampage sentenced to life

Published

4 years ago

November 16, 2021

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A man who stabbed people at random, killing one and seriously injuring seven others, has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years.

Zephaniah McLeod carried out the series of attacks in the early hours of 6 September last year, as people were enjoying a night out in Birmingham City Centre.

CCTV and dashcam footage captured him walking calmly through the streets, stabbing people, then moving on.

McLeod pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, as well as four charges of attempted murder and three charges of wounding with intent.

He was sentenced at Birmingham Crown Court.

After the first three stabbings, he disposed of his knife down a drain, took a taxi to his home in Selly Oak, four miles away, where he re-armed himself and headed back to the city centre.

It was then that he came across Jacob Billington, 23, from Liverpool, and his friend Michael Callaghan.

They were part of a group of seven friends returning to their hotel after a night out.

McLeod asked the group if they had a lighter before attacking Mr Billington and Mr Callaghan.

Mr Billington was stabbed through the neck. He was rushed to hospital but pronounced dead at 2.57am.

His mother, Jo, had last seen her son as he left to celebrate a friend’s birthday.

“I can still see him leaving the house with the lads in the car outside beeping the horns getting him to hurry up, and he skipped out, and we just thought he was going for a lovely night out with his friends,” she recalled.

She was woken in the early hours by police knocking on the door to tell her that her son had been killed.

“It was absolutely awful. You feel like you had all the breath sucked out of you is the best way to describe it,” she said.

She then had to wake his sisters to tell them.

Abbie Billington, 22, remembered the moment she found out her brother was dead.

“There are just no words to describe the sadness that I felt,” she said.

Mr Callaghan had suffered catastrophic injures.

McLeod’s knife had severed his jugular vein and carotid artery. He lost so much blood he had a stroke.

His mother, Anne Callaghan, was woken by a call from the hospital.

“We were called in the morning about 5.30am by a nurse to say that he was in theatre, and he was stable, and obviously that was terrible to hear.

“We didn’t know what she was talking about, and I said, ‘what’s happened?’ She said, ‘he’s been stabbed’. I couldn’t grasp it at all.”

They travelled to Birmingham and were told that if he survived, he would have life-changing injuries.

It was 10 days before they were confident he would make it.

Before the stabbing, Mr Callaghan and Mr Billington were in a band. They both loved music, and the former enjoyed sport too. But over the last 14 months, he has had to relearn to walk and still can’t use his left hand.

His mother said life is difficult for her son, who is mourning the loss of his best friend.

“Michael is just devastated at the loss of Jacob,” she said. “They were totally on the same wavelength, and you know he misses him every day.”

The court heard McLeod had been suffering with paranoid schizophrenia since 2012 and these were not his first offences.

He had previous convictions for robbery, escaping from lawful custody, possession of a firearm in a public place and possession of class A drugs.

He had spoken to a psychiatrist on the phone on 3 September, days before the attack.

“On release from prison in April 2020, we were unable to make contact with him as we were not informed of his whereabouts. I spoke to Zephaniah briefly on the phone whilst he was with his Care Coordinator…” Dr Ezzine Onuba, the psychiatrist, wrote in a statement to the court.

“Zephaniah continues to hear voices which he told me is there all the time and can be distressing.

“It was difficult to do a full assessment. He was due to be seen face to face on 24 September 2020.”

Superintendent Jim Munro from West Midlands Police told Sky News: “He wasn’t under any license conditions and actively being managed, so he’d come back out having served his sentence.”

Mrs Callaghan believes he should never be released.

“All I want is for him to be off the streets because I don’t think he can be ever trusted again,” she said.

“He’s not answered any questions, he’s not talked about it, we don’t know anything about why he did what he did. How can anybody say he’s safe again? I don’t think anybody can.”

Mr Billington’s mother says she believes mistakes have been made by the authorities and hopes a serious case review under way looking into the agencies that were aware of McLeod will provide answers.

“For me, there’s quite a lot of unanswered questions about what happened on that night,” she said. “And what led up to that night in terms of… this was somebody well known to lots of different agencies in many different sectors, and yet still it appears that he was in a position where he did this.

“The fact that he didn’t appear to have been monitored in the way that you would imagine he would.

“As somebody who was known to be dangerous and had a long previous history of being dangerous, had a known mental health condition, none of which seems to have been taken into account at all in terms of how he was monitored.”

UK

Diogo Jota: Liverpool players join mourners as Premier League star and his brother Andre Silva buried in Portugal

Published

7 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Diogo Jota: Liverpool players join mourners as Premier League star and his brother Andre Silva buried in Portugal

Liverpool players past and present have joined the family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva for their funeral in Portugal.

A service was held in the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in their hometown of Gondomar near Porto in northern Portugal on Saturday morning.

Mourners lined the streets and some in the crowd clapped as the brothers’ coffins were carried into the church.

The funeral – in pictures

Jota, 28, leaves behind his wife of only 11 days, Rute Cardoso, and three young children.

His younger brother, 25, was an attacking midfielder for Penafiel in the second tier of Portuguese football.

Liverpool manager Arne Slot, captain Virgil Van Dijk and teammates including Andy Robertson, Conor Bradley, Ryan Gravenberch, Cody Gakpo, Curtis Jones, Darwin Nunez and Joe Gomez were seen at the service.

Former teammates Jordan Henderson, James Milner and Fabinho were also there.

Van Dijk carried a red wreath with Jota’s number 20, while Robertson had a wreath featuring number 30, Silva’s number at Penafiel.

Some of Jota’s teammates in the Portuguese national side also attended, including Bruno Fernandes, of Manchester United, Ruben Dias and Bernardo Silva, of Manchester City, Joao Felix and Renato Veiga, of Chelsea, Nelson Semedo, from Wolves, Joao Moutinho and Rui Patricio.

Ruben Neves was one of the pallbearers after flying in from Florida where he played for Al Hilal in the Club World Cup quarter-final on Friday night.

‘More than a friend’

In a post published on Instagram before the service, he told Jota he had been “more than a friend, we’re family, and we won’t stop being that way just because you’ve decided to sign a contract a little further away from us!”

Jota’s fellow Liverpool midfielder, Alexis Mac Allister, said on Instagram: “I can’t believe it. I’ll always remember your smiles, your anger, your intelligence, your camaraderie, and everything that made you a person. It hurts so much; we’ll miss you. Rest in peace, dear Diogo.”

Porto FC president Andre Villas-Boas and Portugal national team manager Roberto Martinez were also in attendance.

‘With us forever’

Speaking after the ceremony, Martinez said the period since their deaths had been “really, really sad days, as you can imagine, but today we showed we are a large, close family.

“Their spirit will be with us forever.”

The service was private, but the words spoken by the Bishop of Porto, Manuel Linda, were broadcast to those standing outside the church.

He told Jota’s children, who were not at the service, that he was praying for them specifically, as well as their mother and grandparents.

“There are no words, but there are feelings,” he said, adding: “We also suffer a lot and we are with you emotionally.”

The brothers died after a Lamborghini they were travelling in burst into flames following a suspected tyre blowout in the early hours of Thursday morning.

No other vehicles are said to have been involved in the incident.

Liverpool have delayed the return of their players for pre-season following Jota’s death and players past and present paid tribute to him and his brother on social media.

Flowers have been left outside Anfield, where flags have been lowered to half-mast and all club shops, museums and tours have been closed until Monday.

UK

Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Published

10 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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Rachel Reeves hints at tax rises in autumn budget after welfare bill U-turn

Rachel Reeves has hinted that taxes are likely to be raised this autumn after a major U-turn on the government’s controversial welfare bill.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Universal Credit and Personal Independent Payment Bill passed through the House of Commons on Tuesday after multiple concessions and threats of a major rebellion.

MPs ended up voting for only one part of the plan: a cut to universal credit (UC) sickness benefits for new claimants from £97 a week to £50 from 2026/7.

Initially aimed at saving £5.5bn, it now leaves the government with an estimated £5.5bn black hole – close to breaching Ms Reeves’s fiscal rules set out last year.

In an interview with The Guardian, the chancellor did not rule out tax rises later in the year, saying there were “costs” to watering down the welfare bill.

“I’m not going to [rule out tax rises], because it would be irresponsible for a chancellor to do that,” Ms Reeves told the outlet.

“We took the decisions last year to draw a line under unfunded commitments and economic mismanagement.

“So we’ll never have to do something like that again. But there are costs to what happened.”

Meanwhile, The Times reported that, ahead of the Commons vote on the welfare bill, Ms Reeves told cabinet ministers the decision to offer concessions would mean taxes would have to be raised.

The outlet reported that the chancellor said the tax rises would be smaller than those announced in the 2024 budget, but that she is expected to have to raise tens of billions more.

It comes after Ms Reeves said she was “totally” up to continuing as chancellor after appearing tearful at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Criticising Sir Keir for the U-turns on benefit reform during PMQs, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said the chancellor looked “absolutely miserable”, and questioned whether she would remain in post until the next election.

Sir Keir did not explicitly say that she would, and Ms Badenoch interjected to say: “How awful for the chancellor that he couldn’t confirm that she would stay in place.”

In her first comments after the incident, Ms Reeves said she was having a “tough day” before adding: “People saw I was upset, but that was yesterday.

“Today’s a new day and I’m just cracking on with the job.”

Sir Keir also told Sky News’ political editor Beth Rigby on Thursday that he “didn’t appreciate” that Ms Reeves was crying in the Commons.

“In PMQs, it is bang, bang, bang,” he said. “That’s what it was yesterday.

“And therefore, I was probably the last to appreciate anything else going on in the chamber, and that’s just a straightforward human explanation, common sense explanation.”

UK

Diogo Jota and Andre Silva’s funeral in pictures

Published

11 hours ago

July 5, 2025

admin

Diogo Jota and Andre Silva's funeral in pictures

The family and friends of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre Silva have been joined by Liverpool stars past and present and other Portuguese players at the pair’s funeral near Porto.

The Liverpool forward, 28, and his brother died in a car crash in Spain on Thursday.

Pictures below show the funeral at the Igreja Matriz de Gondomar church in the town of Gondomar near Porto. Click here for our liveblog coverage of the day’s events.