Untold: Jailed Over a Group Chat TV - ABC News online -
Manchester 2020: Murdered on the streets of Manchester – in the days after a group of his friends joined a Telegram chat to vent their anger and grief. 18 months later a court was told that the ten members in the chat were members of a violent and brutal gang who plotted a revenge attack. The trial would result in all ten being sent to jail for a total of 131 years. Untold: Jailed Over a Group Chat, Channel 4 2022
Ademola Adedeji had a place secured to study law at a top university in England. As part of a charity initiative, he had authored a book about inspiring his local community in Moston, Manchester, made an address to parliament and was seen by family and friends as driven by a ‘passion for helping people’.
But in July 2022, Ademola – known by those close to him as Ade – was sentenced to prison as part of a gang along with nine other young Black man.
Prosecutors alleged that Ade belonged to a gang, named M40 after their local zip code, who had plotted a revenge attack after one of their members, Ade’s friend Alexander John Soyoye, was stabbed to death in 2020.
But, according to his family and defense team, the gang was not a ‘gang’ at all – but instead a loose music collective creating songs as part of the young but increasingly popular genre of UK drill music. Ade, who was 17 at the time of Soyoye’s death, was not even part of M40, they say, he merely liked listening to drill music. ABC News online article 2023, ‘Jailed over a group chat’: Use of drill music at UK trials sparks concerns of racism in justice system