Father jailed for killing baby girl

A father who murdered his six-week-old daughter after a campaign of violent abuse was jailed for life today.

Olusola Akinrele, 34, was told he must serve at least 16 years in prison for killing his baby girl Leeya in December 2006.

Leeya died from brain damage 12 days after her apparently lifeless body was found at her home in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire.

During the three weeks before the fatal incident she had sustained 22 broken ribs as well as a fractured skull and a fractured thigh, the Old Bailey heard.

She had also been bitten on the nose and both hands.

Judge Philip Clegg said: "When she was not asleep, Leeya must have been in excruciating pain."

He said Akinrele, a Nigerian, had "little or no interest in his daughter".

"You simply saw her birth as as something which might help you avoid deportation," he told the killer.

Akinrele was described in a psychiatric report as "a manipulative individual with psychopathic traits".

He was convicted of murder by a jury at Ipswich Crown Court and faces automatic deportation on completing his sentence.

The baby's mother Kelly Inman, 22, pleaded guilty earlier to allowing her death and was cleared of murder during the trial.

She received a total sentence of five years, having also been convicted of a separate fraud charge.

It was she who called 999 after Akinrele's final attack on their daughter.

Ipswich Crown Court heard that in the two-and-a-half weeks following her birth, Leeya underwent routine checks by midwives and a health visitor and her condition had not caused concern.

But in the 24 days leading up to the emergency call, she had not been seen by health professionals and was in the care of her parents.

The judge found that the injuries she sustained during that period represented at least three separate attacks.

On one occasion, Leeya must have been shaken and "come into forceful contact with something hard", on another severe force was applied to her right leg, and on a third she had been bitten.

The judge told Akinrele: "During the week before she was taken to hospital, it must have been obvious to both you and Kelly that Leeya was a very sick child who needed immediate treatment."

On December 18 2006, the baby's father was alone upstairs with his daughter when he carried out the attack that killed her.

The judge said: "The attack must have taken the form of either violent shaking or throwing the child down hard."

He told Akinrele that her death was the "culmination of a violent course of conduct committed by you against your daughter over two or three weeks".

"Your victim could not have been more vulnerable. She was only six weeks old and to your knowledge weak and ill.

"It is to be expected that any child should look to its parent for protection. What you did to Leeya was a terrible breach of trust."

The court heard Akinrele had never been interested in his baby, failing to attend ante-natal classes or the birth, during which he turned his phone off to avoid being disturbed.

He saw her "incessant crying" as an "irritant", the judge said.

The fatal attack, he added, took place during a "sudden flash of temper".