Last updated at 17:12 28 May 2004

A teenage boy posed as a spy in an Internet chatroom to persuade a friend to kill him in an "extraordinary suicide attempt", a court heard today.

The boy, 14 at the time, groomed his friend, then 16, with an "elaborate matrix of deceit" involving a series of fictional identities in the chatroom.

The older boy, boy A, tried to kill his friend, boy B, on the orders of the "spy", Manchester Crown Court heard.

He believed that by doing so he would be recruited as a British secret service agent and would be rewarded with a sexual relationship with the spy, who was supposedly a middle-aged woman.

Tricked

But, in reality, boy B had fallen in love with boy A, tricked him into performing sex acts on a webcam and conned him into stabbing him twice in Altrincham, Greater Manchester.

Posing as the spy and promising sex and money, boy B sent messages to boy A ordering him to stab his friend to death.

The following day, June 29 2003, boy A "carried out his orders to the letter" and stabbed boy B once in the chest and once in the stomach.

But Boy B did not die and spent a week in Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester before recovering.

Supervision orders

The older boy, who had fallen victim to the deceit, pleaded guilty to attempted murder. The teenager who had concocted the plot pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice and incitement to murder.

The 16-year-old Boy A was given a two-year supervision order and banned from any contact with the other boy.

The judge gave Boy B a three-year supervision order, banned him from any contact with the boy he had tricked and was told he must only access the Internet under adult supervision and must not enter chatrooms under any circumstances.