'I couldn't keep him safe' Boy, 16, fled Syria only to be killed after taking refuge in UK

After the horror of Homs, a Syrian teenager had found the relative harmony of Huddersfield. After Ahmad Al Ibrahim, 16, was injured in a bomb blast, his parents sent him 3,000 miles away to West Yorkshire.

- Josh Halliday Raphael Boyd

Little more than two weeks after he arrived, Ahmad and his cousin ventured into Huddersfield town centre on a warm spring day with just one aim: to make some friends.

It was only his second time in the usually mundane shopping precinct when he gently brushed past a young couple who were walking along eating ice cream in the afternoon sun. It was the most innocuous of encounters but it ended, within seconds, with Ahmad dying in a pool of blood.

Alfie Franco, 20, had taken “petty exception” to the teenager’s minor accidental contact with his girlfriend and, high on cannabis and armed with a knife, he slashed Ahmad once in the neck.

The teenager clutched his throat and fell to the ground. He suffered a devastating 6cm-deep wound and died in hospital a short time later, at about the same time he had been due to visit his new college. He had dreamed of being a doctor.

Franco was yesterday found guilty of murdering Ahmad in what the prosecution described as an exhibition of “petty bravado” from a person who ran away and “is continuing to run away as he doesn’t have the courage to admit to what he’s done to that young man, which is murder him”.

Franco remained stone-faced as the verdict was read out, while his mother, who attended every day of the trial with his grandfather, looked at her son and wept.

In the days after the killing on 3 April, speculation swirled online that the attacker was an asylum seeker, or that it had been racially motivated, or that Ahmad was a drug dealer. None of this was true.