Schoolboys in robbery jailed for four years

Three schoolboys who pulled off an armed robbery they had planned in between lessons at a top Roman Catholic high school were sentenced to four years' custody yesterday. The trio held a wealthy industrialist at gunpoint in his home after one posed as a policeman.

Three schoolboys who pulled off an armed robbery they had planned in between lessons at a top Roman Catholic high school were sentenced to four years' custody yesterday. The trio held a wealthy industrialist at gunpoint in his home after one posed as a policeman.

Two other boys supplied a replica gun and a mobile phone while a sixth pupil designed a fake police warrant. A seventh boy was asked to lend a pistol from his toy gun collection.

John Reynard, 69, had a revolver pointed at his head and was ushered up the stairs of his £750,000 mansionin Alkrington, Manchester. They kept him in a bedroom while they stole £400.

The youths, aged between 15 and 17 at the time, had spent up to four weeks discussing the robbery in between lessons at the nearby Cardinal Langley School in Middleton.

Judge Burke lifted a reporting ban at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester and allowed the boys to be named. He sentenced Andrew Goulden, 17, Daniel Ekeledo, 18, and Gavin Makin, 16, to four years' youth custody. All three admitted robbery and having an imitation firearm.

Another boy, 17 - whose parents are both schoolteachers - who cannot be named, was sentenced to two and a half years in a young offenders' institution after being convicted of aiding and abetting robbery.