A man has been charged with the murder of teenager Jodie Chesney, who was stabbed in east London on 1 March.

Manuel Petrovic, 20, of Romford, was arrested in Leicester on Tuesday in connection with the incident.

He is due to appear at Barkingside magistrates’ court on Saturday.

Jodie, 17, was with friends near a children’s playground in Harold Hill when she was approached by two men. Police said her friends had noticed two people in the park shortly before but had not interacted with them.

She was pronounced dead a little more than an hour after officers were called to the park at 9.25pm on Friday a week ago.

Police said a second suspect remained in custody.

A postmortem carried out on Sunday established that the cause of Jodie’s death was trauma and haemorrhage.

Following her death, Jodie’s family backed calls for tougher sentences for knife crime. One of her relatives, Karen Chesney, appealed on Facebook for support for a petition calling for a 10-year prison sentence for knife possession and 25 years for using a knife.

On Tuesday afternoon, the parliamentary petition had been signed more than 33,000 times. A total of 100,000 signatures are required before a petition can be considered for debate by MPs.

The current maximum sentence for an adult caught carrying a knife is four years in prison and an unlimited fine. Only those caught with a knife more than once are handed prison sentences.