The sixteen-year-old girl who lured Shakilus Townsend to his death is guilty of nothing more than naivety and gross misjudgement, her defence lawyer told the court yesterday.

Jeremy Dein defending said the girl, who was fifteen at the time, did not mean for Shakilus to be killed and did not intend for him to be seriously harmed.

Seven teenagers are accused of murder at the Old Bailey, all of them deny the charge.

The prosecution allege the girl lured Shakilus to a secluded spot in Thornton Heath where he was beaten with a baseball bat and stabbed by members of the Shine My Nine gang on July 3, 2007.

When she heard he died she said: “I was shocked, I was scared, I was thinking I am going to get arrested and go to jail.

“That was the last thing I expected or wanted to happen to him.”

She told the court her boyfriend Danny McLean was “very angry” when he found out she had been seeing Shakilus Townsend while going out with him.

At the time she believed she loved him and was trying to “sweeten him up” so he would not be angry with her.

When asked about the plan to “get Shak set”, she said: “I think it was something along the lines of, ‘If you still love me, you will set up Shak.’ “I just went along with it.

“I understood set to mean have a fight, kick and punch.”

She alleged the day before Shakilus was attacked, Mr McLean showed her an alleyway he wanted her to bring Shakilus to.

On the day, however, the plan changed and he told her to get off by the church near Beulah Crescent.

She knew Shakilus carried a knife and had seen it when she was going through his rucksack to find his mobile phone.

She told Mr McLean on July 3 Shakilus had a knife on him.

She saw Shakilus posing with knives on his Bebo account but did not take him seriously.

“Boys just brag about what they have done and a lot of times it is just a big old lie and I did not pay attention to it.

“In the time I spent with Danny, he never had a knife, he never talked about knives or things like that, it was the last thing I expected him to carry.”

She said Shakilus started running when he saw Mr McLean coming down the road towards him.

She said: “I just walked straight down the service road.

“I was thinking I need to get out of here.”

She alleges one of the 17-year-old boys with a baseball bat ran after Danny and another boy. She also claims to have seen Tyrell Ellis on the corner of blocks 1 to 6.

As she was walking away, she said Mr McLean joined her.

“He was not walking straight and his head was bleeding.

“He told me that [17-year-old boy] had hit him with the baseball bat.

“I did not know what had happened between Shak and Danny.

“From seeing Danny’s head bleeding, I thought nothing good had happened, I thought something nasty had happened to him.”

She said she found out Shakilus had died when Mr McLean called her the next morning.

She told the jury she went to his house and they met up with Tyrell Ellis and three of the seventeen-year-old boys accused of Shakilus’s murder, in Grangewood Park.

She said they discussed what they were going to say when they got arrested.

Danny McLean, 18, Tyrell Vito Ellis, 19 and Andre Johnson-Haynes, 18, are charged with murder along with a sixteen-year-old girl and three seventeen-year-old boys who cannot be named for legal reasons.

The trial continues.