Modern Britain: Sick and tired.

Perhaps one of the saddest reports I've read in recent weeks, this is also a damning indictment of modern Britain.

Vandals have targeted a children's centre garden that was set up in memory of murdered teenager Mary-Ann Leneghan.

The children's play area at Southcote Children's Centre in Reading, Berks, has been damaged on an almost daily basis over the last few months.

It's actually hard to find words to describe how I feel about this. Sick and tired is about all I can manage, but does little to convey how I feel about it. Mary Ann-Leneghan died the most appalling death after undergoing the most appalling ordeal at the hands of a bunch of degraded and rapacious sub-human thugs. The BBC report, of course, gives little indication of how horrendous Mary-Ann's ordeal was, who carried it out and how they were discovered.

Last year, six men were convicted of murdering Mary-Ann, whose body was found on the morning of 7 May.

She had been stabbed more than 40 times and her throat had been slit.

She was actually kidnapped, held prisoner for two days, repeatedly raped, tortured and beaten before being dumped off and murdered in a park. Mary-Ann was just sixteen. Sixteen for goodness sake! Her murderers were only caught because her friend, who had also been taken, tortured, brutalised and raped, survived by the skin of her teeth.

Four of the killers were on probation and well known to the authorities - but weren't considred "high risk". I guess they are now - at least for a couple of years.

Mary-Ann was white - her killers were not. Whether this was a factor in this case is not known, but it's an increasingly common event in western Europe to find indigenous white girls gang-raped and murdered by non-white immigrant men. It's not known if this was a factor in this case, because no one wants you to know - least of all the BBC.