Boy detained for Facebook insult murder in London

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/england/london/10372678.stm

A 16-year-old boy has been detained for killing a former best friend after the pair traded insults on Facebook. Salum Kombo, 18, was stabbed in the chest in Bromley-by-Bow, east London, in December after calling his killer, then 15, names including "pussy". The teenager, has been ordered to serve a minimum of 14 years. By murdering Mr Kombo, the teenager wanted to prove he wasn’t a “pussy”. Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith said: "This was simply an act of cowardice, as so many stabbings are." David Jeremy, prosecuting, said a previous friendship between Mr Kombo and the defendant had turned to "hostility" and the pair had a fight last summer after a football match. The boy admitted the stabbing but claimed he had been acting in self-defence. An Old Bailey jury rejected his explanation and convicted him of murder in May.

I wasn’t really shocked by reading this. I am surfing on the internet a lot and there are so many people looking for digital fights, and trying to act tough on the internet. I used to play an online game, and people were insulting each other all the time. Sometimes they threatened each other by saying that they will come and look them up in real life. 99% of these threats were all bluff but in this case, the boys knew each other and one wasn’t bluffing. Salum Kombo wanted to deal with it by fighting but the teenager was even more pathetic by pulling out a knife. It is hard to check people’s behaviour on the web since it is so big, so I don’t expect this story to be an unique one, unfortunately.