After the horror of Homs, the Syrian teenager had found the relative harmony of Huddersfield. Sixteen-year-old Ahmad Al Ibrahim had been injured in a bomb blast when his parents sent him 4,000 miles away to West Yorkshire.
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 another 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, who had dreamed of being a doctor, clutched his throat and fell to the ground. He had sustained a 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.
Franco was on Thursday 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 his 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.
The truth, as police quickly discovered, was that Ahmad’s murder was appallingly senseless. After turning himself in, Franco told detectives he had felt threatened by the teenager and pulled out a knife when he thought: “It’s me or him.”
The 20-year-old who appeared in the courtroom dock, looking and sounding like a teenager called into the headteacher’s office for a telling off, was a far cry from the cocky figure in the video of the attack played to the court.
According to people close to Franco and his family, he has had a troubled life, with issues related to drug abuse and “hanging out with the wrong crowd”. The trial at Leeds crown court heard that Franco was born in Huddersfield but moved to South Africa with his family as a baby, returning when he was 13.
He said South Africa was “a beautiful place but it is quite dangerous”, telling the court his family’s home was burgled “at least once or twice a week” and that he had been mugged “countless times” but never experienced violence because he always handed his possessions over.
Franco said that when he returned to Huddersfield as a teenager he was bullied because of his accent and beaten up at school. He told jurors he was stabbed in his hand when he was 17, and cut in the face during an incident last October. He carried a blade “for protection”, he told jurors, adding that all of his friends carried knives. “Most people carry a knife,” he said.
Ahmad’s uncle, Ghazwan Al Ibrahim, with whom he was living in Huddersfield, said he had encouraged the teenager to go out that day, to make friends his own age, after spending Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr with his younger cousins.
In a statement after the verdict on Thursday, Al Ibrahim said the boy’s parents were “heartbroken beyond words”. He would always carry a guilt, he said, that “Ahmad had come to the UK, and I could not keep him safe”. “He’d only spent a few days with my kids but they loved him so much because he was a very nice boy, very lovely and kindly with the kids,” he told the Guardian after Ahmad’s death.
After the verdict, he said he could not imagine how his nephew must have felt spending his last moments “alone in a strange country that should have been the place where he was safe”.
“The image of having to identify my nephew and then having to break the news to my brother and sister-in-law, and relay to them what had happened to their precious son, will never leave me.”
Back in Homs, Ahmad had lived with his taxi driver father, his mother and his three sisters. He had been loved by his schoolmates and teachers in Syria’s third-biggest city and achieved the top maths grades in his class. He loved school, his uncle said, “that’s why he came here. He wished to be a doctor, to save people.”
He had moved to Huddersfield on 20 March, 14 days before he was killed, after spending six months in a refugee centre in Swansea, where he was well liked. The staff at the centre and Ahmad’s social worker had contacted his uncle saying they were heartbroken he had died. “They were crying for Ahmad, they said they loved him,” Ghazwan Al Ibrahim said.
While Franco told the jury he regularly visited South Africa to see family and friends, it has since become known that the reasons for these visits were “to keep Alfie out of trouble” and away from the increasingly violent world in West Yorkshire he had involved himself in.
Franco told police after his arrest that the knife he used to kill Ahmad belonged to a recently deceased uncle and he had kept it with him for sentimental reasons. This was later found to be a lie, concocted with his brother on the way to handing himself in, in order to “get his story straight”.
The defendant owned several knives, sending photos and videos of his growing collection to friends with captions such as “artillery coming along nice”. Texts read out during the trial sent the night before Ahmad’s murder showed a conversation between Franco and an acquaintance whom he told the court he was afraid of and was trying to impress.
In the messages, Franco said he was “ready to do a mazza” [something crazy] and was going to “chef” and “ching” [both slang for stab] a person who had stolen the acquaintance’s bike, even though the acquaintance was trying to de-escalate the situation.
Franco’s claims of self-defence were brushed away emphatically by the prosecutor Richard Wright KC, who said it was a case of “a young man with a cocky swagger, on drugs with his girlfriend, who doesn’t like the fact that a young man has spoken back at him and is getting ready to use his knife before Ahmad has even walked towards him”.
The defence claimed Franco’s experiences as a victim of knife crime had made him defensive and that he had mistaken Ahmad’s vape for a knife.
Gill Batts KC, defending, said the prosecution had “chosen at best to minimise and at worst ignore the part that Ahmad had played in this” and that the 16-year-old’s actions had “caused a chain of events” that led to his death.
Temporary Det Supt Damian Roebuck called Ahmad’s murder “horrific” and said the loss of his life in “such a pointless, motiveless attack in our communities at the hands of someone he never met is an absolute tragedy for him and all those who knew him”.
