A brother and sister have been ordered to be detained for a total of seven-and-a-half years for torturing an 11-year-old schoolboy.

The BBC's Mary Askew reports from Carlisle: A harrowing case

Daniel Greer, also 11, and his sister Emma, aged 15, admitted punching, kicking and stabbing the boy who they threatened to kill and eventually threw into a river after setting his hair on fire.

The three-hour ordeal happened in May this year, in Carlisle. The victim was ambushed on his way home from school.

Carlisle Crown Court heard that the pair beat the boy with his own tennis racket, then marched him like a prisoner to a railway bridge where they threatened to kill him.

Whipped and stabbed

The catalogue of assaults, which Judge Robert Brown, called "evil, wicked and cruel", moved to a riverside where the schoolboy was whipped with tree branches, stabbed three times and pushed into the water.

The victim was forced into this river

In hospital the boy was found to have more than 40 wounds and bruises.

Judge Brown said allowing the defendants' names to be published should act as a powerful deterrent to others.

Daniel Greer was sentenced to four-and-a-half years' youth detention, his sister Emma to three years.

The judge said the sentence was not only because of their wicked bullying, but also so they could receive proper care and help.

The court heard that the brother and sister came from a family where there were no role models - their father, mother and an elder brother had criminal convictions.

Both had been deprived of a proper upbringing and one defence lawyer said the norm in the family was to react with violence to any difficulty.

After the case, Sheila Southerland, head of Child and Family Services for Cumbria Social Services, said the victim's suffering was appalling.

Detective Constable Steve Wright, of Cumbria Police, said the punishment handed down should deter other bullies.

He said the victim's family had been seriously effected by the violence, although the boy himself was recovering well.

Previous warnings published locally

The brother and sister had also been convicted of attacking a 14-year-old girl and setting her hair on fire just two days before this particular incident.

And the local weekly newspaper, the Cumberland News, said that a seven- year-old boy had been tied up and tortured by the Greers a year earlier.