Life term for bottle attack killer

12 April 2012

A music promoter who stabbed a young father with a broken champagne bottle as he celebrated his birthday has been jailed for life.

Olu Olagbaju, 26, collapsed and died after being attacked by five men in Shadan's nightclub in the City of London in December 2006.

Terrified witnesses described how one of them held his arms back while another, Dashem Tesfamichael, stabbed him in the chest with the bottle. Tesfamichael then sped off in a Mercedes and made his way to Italy and then Miami in the US before being extradited back to Britain, the Old Bailey heard.

The Eritrean-born 23-year-old, of Camden, north London, pleaded guilty to murder and was jailed for life with a minimum term of 13 years.

Mr Olagbaju, a music producer, had a daughter with fiancee Terri Jacob and was looking forward to the birth of their second child, a son born the following July. He was taken to the Royal London Hospital but emergency heart surgery failed to save him and he was pronounced dead shortly afterwards.

Fernando Anyere, 23, of Enfield, north London, Ademda Oladeji, 29, of Stoke Newington, north London, and brothers Okechukwu Okpala, 24, of Hackney, east London, and Uzoma Okpala, 27, of Woolwich, south east London, were also involved. All four admitted violent disorder.

Trouble erupted within minutes of the "flash" group coming into the club at 1.17am on December 4, 2006 and there was soon a confrontation between one of them and the victim. The scuffle developed into an attack on Mr Olagbaju.

Anyere, who had previous convictions for knife possession, was jailed for two years and four months and was in addition ordered to serve a 28-week suspended sentence for possessing crack cocaine. Oladeji, Okechukwu Okpala and Uzoma Okpala each received two years.

A third Okpala brother, Obinna, pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice after driving Tesfamichael to Stansted Airport from where he fled the UK.