A public schoolboy who claimed he was sleepwalking when he attacked two students and a teacher with hammers can now be named.

It comes after a judge lifted an order preventing the identification of 17-year-old international student, Thomas Wei Huang.

Last week, he was detained for life with a minimum term of 12 years after he was found guilty of three charges of attempted murder in June following a 10-week trial.

Huang, who turns 18 in January, was dressed only in his boxer shorts when he repeatedly hit his dormmates as they slept in one of the boarding houses at the co-ed Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon, in June last year.

Both boys suffered skull fractures, as well as injuries to their ribs, spleen, a punctured lung and internal bleeding. He then attacked a teacher who attempted to intervene.

They had been asleep in cabin-style beds when Huang climbed up and attacked them shortly before 1am on 9 June last year.

Maths teacher Henry Roffe-Silvester told Exeter Crown Court he was asleep in his own quarters when he was awoken by noises coming from the boarding house and went to investigate.

He said he saw a silhouetted figure standing in front of him in the room who then turned and repeatedly hit him over the head with a hammer.

“Physically I stumbled backwards into the corridor. There was a second blow – I can’t remember if it was before I stumbled back – that’s a little bit hazy for me,” said Mr Roffe-Silvester, who suffered six blows to the head.

Another student heard Mr Roffe-Silvester shouting and swearing as he fled the bedroom and dialled 999 – believing there was an intruder.

The two boys were discovered in their beds a few minutes later.

Huang, from Malaysia, who was 16 at the time, admitted carrying out the attacks but said he was sleepwalking. He denied three charges of attempted murder on the basis he was not guilty by reason of insanity.

But the court was told he had an obsession with the killing of children and hammers, which he said he kept by his bed for “protection” from the “zombie apocalypse”.

Prosecutors said the boy armed himself with three claw hammers and waited for the two boys to be asleep before attacking them.

At his sentencing hearing last month, judge Mrs Justice Cutts said experts could not say how long he would pose a risk to the public as she jailed him for life with a minimum term of 12 years.

“You planned your offences and used hammers you had bought as weapons,” she told Huang, adding that, as an “intelligent boy”, he “knew full well if you hit the boys multiple times with the hammers they would die”.

She told him there was a significant risk he could repeat his attack and therefore he posed “a high level of danger to the public because of the nature of your offences”.

In evidence, Huang told the jury he wanted to come to England to study in a boarding school and was “excited” to do so.

Asked if he was happy at the school, he replied: “Yes I was. I liked my friends, my teachers and the academic aspect of it. I didn’t like the sports and the food at the school.”

He described life at the boarding school, including pupils sharing takeaways and tubs of sweets.

The court heard Huang’s brother, who is two years older than him, also went to Blundell’s.

Huang can be named after a court official confirmed his lawyers would not be appealing the judge’s earlier decision to lift the reporting restriction, which was made at the sentencing hearing following an application by the PA news agency.

As mother-of-three Danielle pushes two prams down the street in south London, her only thought is where will they all sleep tonight?

The 21-year-old, whose children are all under the age of five, had a council house in Southwark but had to move out because she faced threats of violence.

“I didn’t know that going to the police would end up with me being homeless,” she says.

Heartbroken and panicking, with nowhere else to go, Danielle is in a park with her three children – two daughters, aged one and four, and her two-year-old son.

“I’m so sorry, I wish this could all be better,” she tells them. Her eldest clutches a plastic toy and asks when they are going home.

“We don’t have a home anymore,” Danielle replies. She can’t hide the truth from her any longer.

Danielle, who has long dark hair and is wearing a puffer jacket, is pacing, her mobile phone pressed to her ear, making a series of desperate phone calls, pleading for help.

“Where am I going to go with the kids,” she asks a housing officer. “I have nowhere to go.”

At this point it’s around 3pm and council offices will soon be closing. As her phone dies, Danielle, now sitting on a bench, her eldest daughter comforting her siblings in their buggies, breaks down in tears.

Her story exemplifies a national housing crisis where currently more than 150,000 children in England are living in temporary accommodation.

It is hard to imagine someone more vulnerable; a 21-year-old, at risk of violence, a care leaver herself, mother-of-three. If she’s fallen through the net, then who is it catching?

Initially, Southwark council paid for her to have temporary accommodation elsewhere.

But things changed when police informed them it was too dangerous for her to come back to the borough.

“To sit there and tell a four-year-old little girl we can’t go home because we don’t have a home, that’s very upsetting as a mum because I brought her into this world to love her, protect her, to give her a home, and me being a mum telling her I can’t do that right now, it breaks my heart, but I know it’s not my fault,” she tells Sky News.

“Last Tuesday, I got a call to say they could no longer fund my accommodation because the police said it’s no longer safe to return back to Southwark, so they don’t owe me a duty of care.”

The council emailed her a letter which implied she was being made homeless for her own protection. The letter instructed her to present herself to another “local authority homeless person unit to seek rehousing outside of Southwark,” it said. “This is on the grounds of personal protection for you and your children.”

The letter, dated 30 September, explained her current accommodation would terminate on 9 October.

But, when Danielle approached another council, they wanted more details from Southwark. In the meantime, her landlord said Southwark had stopped paying, so he evicted her and changed the locks.

“We are just going around in a loop and in the meantime me and my children are homeless, and nobody seems to care,” she told us when we found her on 10 October.

“They are not protecting me or my children, they’ve put us at an even more high risk, but they don’t seem to acknowledge that.”

As we sit on the park bench together, a Southwark housing officer calls confirming that, despite her being on the streets, they would not extend the temporary accommodation. The person on the phone says it was a management decision.

At this point, we call Southwark’s press office and get a very different tone and a sense that the situation isn’t acceptable.

After an anxious wait, by late afternoon Danielle is told she can return to her temporary accommodation.

But while Danielle was on the streets, she took her child for a routine vaccination and was flagged with children’s social services, which adds to her worries.

“I know I am a good mum,” she says. “A doctor might have thought my nails were dirty or I didn’t look like a normal person, but she has to understand, I had nowhere to go that day.

“I had no keys, nowhere to live. I was living out of a black bag in my grandad’s shed. So, what do you expect?”

In a statement, councillor Sarah King from Southwark told us: “This has been a very distressing situation for Danielle and her children, and I hope that she is at least relieved to be in safe accommodation now. We will be working to resolve her housing situation permanently and continue to support her until that happens.”

The council she was applying to told us they believed the issue was now being dealt with by Southwark.

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Housing lawyer Simeon Wilmore told Sky he’s come across this kind of thing “many times” and believes both councils have behaved badly.

“Southwark should have been in contact with the receiving party or receiving local authority and it should be more managed and structured, and she should be at the centre of the decision making,” he said.

“If they have reason to believe she may be eligible for priority needs then the duty of care kicks in. They must accommodate.”

The problem is councils have run out of homes. In Southwark alone 17,700 people are on the borough’s waiting list, nearly treble the figure over five years ago.

On average councils spend 1% of their budget on temporary accommodation, but research by Sky News has found 30 councils spend 10% or more, with several spending over 20% of their overall budgets on homelessness. This is council money going to private landlords.

Adam Hugg, head of housing at the Local Government Association, says the numbers of people needing support “are going through the roof” and the lack of available homes “creates a real challenge”.

He says there is a need for long-term investment to build more council houses as well as reform to housing benefit to make sure more people can be kept in their homes.

Danielle has few home comforts in her temporary flat, which has plain white walls and a TV on the floor. Her wish is for a place she can make her own and paint her daughter’s bedroom walls pink.

She has Halloween decorations on a shelf, while in a corner of the living room there is a long box containing a Christmas tree. On top, there is a child’s yet-to-be-filled-out wish list for Father Christmas, while a pack of red and white baubles and a can of snow spray sit nearby.

“These are all my little Christmas bits I’m going to do with the kids when we eventually have a home,” Danielle says, but she still has no idea when that might be.

“They have told me I’m not going to be here for Christmas,” she says. “So, I don’t know where I’ll be. I just hope it’s not on the street.”

It seems the housing crisis has reached a point where even extreme vulnerability is no guarantee of help.

Councils want more secure longer-term government funding so they can build more homes, but with more children than ever living in temporary accommodation, this is a chronic national problem that will take more than one Christmas to solve.

Sara Sharif’s stepmother sent her sister some pictures of the 10-year-old looking bruised and miserable – and told her to “delete” them, a court has heard.

“Look what he’s doing,” Beinash Batool told Qandeela Saboohi, referring to the beatings Sara was allegedly getting from her father, Urfan Sharif.

“Delete the pictures.”

A series of WhatsApp messages exchanged between 2020 and 2023, in which Batool told her sister about the physical attacks Sharif was allegedly inflicting on his daughter, were read out to a jury at the Old Bailey.

Batool repeatedly told her sister that Sharif was hitting Sara for being “naughty”, “rude and rebellious”, and because she had cut up his clothes, hidden keys and torn up documents.

Batool, 30, Urfan Sharif, 42, and Sara’s uncle, 29-year-old Faisal Malik, are accused of carrying out a campaign of abuse culminating in Sara’s murder on 8 August last year.

As early as February 2020, Batool described Sharif as going on a “rampage” after spilling hot tea, saying he was “possessed”.

Writing about 10 photographs of Sara, she wrote: “This is how bad he is beating her… I feel really sorry for her. He beat the crap out of her.”

On another occasion, Batool said Sharif “went ballistic” and “beat Sara up like crazy”. She expressed fears he could break an arm or leg.

In May 2021, Batool told Ms Saboohi: “Not great in our house, it’s all a bit manic. Urfan beat the crap out of Sara and my mind is all in bits. I really want to report him.

“Why the hell doesn’t Urfan learn – she’s covered in bruises, literally beaten black.”

Afterwards, Sharif sat “on his fat bum” and played the board game Ludo, she said.

She went on: “Why the hell I’m even letting him in the house. I’m sorry for Sara, poor girl cannot walk. She literally fainted in the kitchen in the morning. He made her do sit-ups all night.”

Asked what Sara had done, Batool said: “Because she hid the keys.”

By 2022, Batool said she was planning to get some “legal advice” but was advised by her sister to give it time and not to rush.

In an update later that year, Batool said she was thinking about taking Sara out of school, saying: “I don’t want to but kinda don’t have a choice.

“I’m just fed up of her behaviour and Urfan’s. Sara’s body is literally bruised because Urfan beat her up. I cannot even cover it up.

“He beat Sara up yesterday and I can’t send her to school on Monday looking like that.

“She ripped Urfan’s documents in front of him and was being rude and rebellious.”

Referring to an image of Sara in a hijab, Batool wrote: “You haven’t even seen her body, it’s a whole lot worse.”

Days later, she said Sara’s school was worried about her and Sharif was “stressed” about it.

In an apparent reference to Sara’s injuries, she wrote: “Urfan told me to cover it up with makeup and she’s going to wear sunglasses.”

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Two months before Sara died, Batool referred to “Sara’s antics”, telling her sister: “Urfan beat the crap out of Sara… Yeah, he beat her up like crazy.

“Her oxygen level dropped really low, she’s finding it hard to stay awake.”

Asked if Sharif had hit her on the head, Batool said: “Nah, but she’s breathing really rapidly.”

The day before Sara died, Ms Saboohi tried to make contact but Batool told her she was “not in the mood to speak”.

Two days later, the defendants were captured on CCTV as they prepared to board a flight to Pakistan from Heathrow Airport.

That CCTV has now been shown to the jury.

On 10 August last year, police found Sara’s body in a bunkbed after Sharif called from Pakistan to say he had beaten her up “too much” for “being naughty”.

William Emlyn Jones KC, the prosecutor, has previously told jurors it was disputed whether messages Batool sent to two of her sisters were accurate or gave a full picture.

All three defendants, formerly of Hammond Road in Woking in Berkshire, have denied murder and causing or allowing the death of a child between 16 December 2022 and 9 August 2023.

The trial continues.