TWO drunken thugs who beat up a man at a bus stop have walked free from court.

Abdu Mohamed, 35, lost consciousness when Jack Howe and Joe Chaney attacked him outside Bromley North railway station.

Eighteen-year-old Howe was drunk on 20 bottles of beer when he punched his victim in the chest before both boys kicked him as he lay helplessly in the street while others watched.

Mr Mohamed, who is still emotionally scarred from the attack, told Croydon Crown Court that he heard people shouting racist obscenities during his ordeal, but he could not identify who it was.

He said: "I wanted to run, but I couldn’t.

"They were just all over me. I was so frightened, I was asking them please, please."

In a victim impact statement he said: "This is the only time I ever felt that I wanted to be back in my home country. It is the only time I felt threatened and scared. I’m lucky to be alive."

The attack happened after Mr Mohamed fell asleep on a bus after a night out in Brixton and missed his stop at Gipsy Hill, in May last year.

CCTV cameras captured Howe and Chaney, who is just 17, carrying out the attack while other youths looked on. The victim suffered a cut above his left eye and a bump at the back of the head.

Judge John Tanzer said the group had behaved "like a pack of wolves".

He said: "Here’s a man who got kicked to the ground for no reason whatsoever, perhaps apart from his ethnic origin."

Howe and Chaney, slumped in the dock, denied saying racist words during the attack.

The judge said he did not for one minute suggest that, sober, either Howe and Chaney was racist, but they were part of a pack and some people were shouting racist remarks. He added people had been killed in similar drunken late-night fights.

Sentencing them for affray on Wednesday last week, he ordered the pair to pay their victim £500 compensation each and sentenced them to a 12-month supervision order and 120 hours’ unpaid work.

He also ordered them to pay £250 costs each. Howe, of Baring Road, Grove Park, and Chaney, of Jodane Street, Deptford, have no previous convictions.

They both admitted affray before their trial started, but denied racially-aggravated malicious wounding.

Cleared

Luke Gilby, 18, Matthew Jarvis, 18, and a teenager who cannot be named for legal reasons were cleared by the jury of both charges on the direction of the judge after the prosecution offered no evidence against them half way through the trial.

The prosecution also offered no evidence in relation to the racially-aggravated charges against Howe and Chaney and a substitute charge of malicious wounding was ordered to lie on file.

The judge lifted reporting restrictions banning the identification of Chaney after an application by the Bromley Extra.