Two charged with hit-and-run murders as more are arrested

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A seventh person has been arrested in connection with the murder of three Birmingham men who were hit by a car while trying to protect their community from looters.

West Midlands Police said a 30-year-old man from the city was arrested on suspicion of murder shortly after 10am yesterday. The arrest followed a preliminary hearing at Birmingham Crown Court yesterday, in which two men and a teenage boy were charged with the murders.

Joshua Donald, 26, Adam King, 23, and a 17-year-old, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were remanded in custody to appear at the same court on 9 December. Three other males, aged 16, 27 and 32, have also been bailed pending further enquiries in relation to the murders.

Haroon Jahan, 21, and brothers Shazad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31, were hit by a car in the early hours of last Wednesday during riots. They were all pronounced dead at hospital.

A 16-year-old boy should be charged with the murder of a man who was attacked during the London riots, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said last night.

Richard Bowes, 68, died on Thursday after being assaulted during disorder in Ealing, west London, last Monday. The CPS said it had authorised the Metropolitan Police to charge a 16-year-old boy with murder. The teenager is also charged with violent disorder and four separate burglaries of commercial premises. His mother is charged with doing an act that tended to pervert the course of public justice.

Courts across the country continued to wade through the flood of cases brought about by last week's civil unrest. At Camberwell Magistrates' Court in London, 25-year-old Daniel Anderson was jailed for six months after police found stolen guitars, a television and hair clippers at his home in Croydon, south London.

Anderson said he had not taken part in the violence himself, but had fished the stolen goods out of bins on his road where they had been temporarily stashed. Sentencing him, chair of the Magistrates Bench Novello Noades said: "The offence is so serious that only a custodial sentence can be justified."

In Manchester Crown Court, 18-year-old Michael Fitzpatrick confessed to rioting and looting in the city centre last week. The court heard how his parents had "frogmarched" him to a police station after seeing photos of him in a national newspaper.

The teenager admitted being involved in the attack on sports shop Footasylum, which reported £14,000 of training shoes stolen. He also entered a ransacked Spar shop, which suffered £4,000 of damage and lost £25,000 of stock, and a Bang & Olufsen store, which suffered £800 of damage and lost £70,000 of goods. He has been remanded in custody and will be sentenced on Thursday.

A 13-year-old boy, who cannot be named because of his age, walked free from the same court after receiving a nine-month referral order for burglary and violent disorder. His mother told reporters she was "ashamed" of her son but blamed "the Government" for the looting, adding: "There is fuck all for them to do."

The tough sentences handed out to young people over the past few days have caused criminal justice groups to question the wisdom of the tactics, pointing out that jailing opportunistic looters risks turning them into hardened criminals.