This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Police investigating the murder of Jaden Moodie say he was killed in a frenzied attack lasting 30 seconds, suffering at least eight stab wounds inflicted by three male suspects each armed with a knife.

The 14-year-old died in the street in Leyton, east London, last Tuesday, after a black Mercedes knocked him off a stolen moped he was riding and he was set upon.

The savagery of the attack on a child, which police say was targeted, made the murder stand out among recent homicides.

DCI Chris Soole said every aspect of the killing was premeditated; from the Mercedes ramming the moped from behind, to knocking Jaden to the ground and the suspects being armed and stabbing him to death. “They knew what they wanted to do and they did it. I believe it was premeditated,” Soole said.

Soole added that there were five people in the Mercedes and all could be culpable of murder, not just the three who stabbed Jaden. “There were five suspects who travelled into Bickley Road, in the vehicle, and of those five, three inflicted the multiple stab wounds on Jaden.”

Soole said one line of inquiry was that the suspects were connected to drugs. Police are building a case but no arrests had been made yet.

The attack happened in an area with a large number of pedestrians and vehicles passing by and not all of them have come forward. Soole said people should tell detectives what they know no matter how trivial they may think their information may be.

He said anyone who witnessed the attack last Tuesday at 6.30pm, or had information about the suspects, should not fear passing information to police.

Soole said the savagery of the attack had angered locals. “The community are up in arms because of the barbaric nature of the attack.”

Jaden’s family last week said he was not connected to gangs and Soole said the victim was at a “formative age” and that the killers posed a danger to others and had to be caught.

Soole added: “It is premature to make a judgment on a 14-year-old boy’s character. The focus of the investigation team is to concentrate on bringing to justice those who have committed a barbaric and cowardly act. That is where our focus needs to be.

“Any difficult conversations we have to have, the first people who deserve to hear them will be the family.”

Soole said five or six theories fitted the facts of the case, which has been helped by the recovery of the Mercedes, which the attackers dumped close to where Jaden was pronounced dead.

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Officers will return to the scene of the crime on Tuesday evening to appeal for witnesses. They will also visit the road where the Mercedes was dumped.

Appealing for the media to respect the privacy of Jaden’s family, Soole said: “God only knows what they’re going through as a family with the death of a 14-year-old boy killed in tragic circumstances.

“The death of anybody is a tragic incident anyway, but the death of a 14-year-old does shock to the core.”

His comments came as Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, attacked government cuts to policing after an freedom of information request revealed Scotland Yard’s murder investigation unit had lost a quarter of its officers and staff over the past decade.

Last year, there were 315 fewer police and civilians working in the Metropolitan police’s homicide and major crime command (HMCC) than in 2008, figures released to the Press Association revealed.

The unit’s overall strength decreased by 26% over the 10-year period, while the number of major investigation teams (MITs) dropped from 26 to 18. By 2018, there were half the number of officers and other staff working within those specialist teams than a decade earlier, data from Britain’s largest police force shows.

Scotland Yard said its HMCC included murder detectives as well as specialist operations, such as Winter Key – its child sex abuse inquiry – and investigations into alleged electoral fraud and the Grenfell Tower fire.

Six weeks after the force was first asked to explain the figures, a spokeswoman said: “The Metropolitan Police Service frequently adjusts resources to respond to violence in London.”

However, Khan blamed a shortfall in police funding, in which the overall number of police officers has dropped below 30,000 for the first time in 15 years.

He said the figures demonstrated “some of the consequences of the massive government cuts over the last nine years”.

“I’ve been saying ever since I became mayor the cuts from the government to the Met Police Service aren’t sustainable. And I’ve been lobbying the government to reverse the cuts they’ve made over the last eight years. We’ve seen in our city police officers lost, community police support officers lost, police staff lost. We’ve seen the FoI information today.

“It’s not sustainable for us to have the best police service in the world, the best resourced police in the world, with these sorts of cuts.

“The police are working incredibly hard, they’re under-resourced and over-stretched, and that’s why I will carry on lobbying the government for more resources. In the meantime, we’re doing what we can in London.”