Ana Kriégel murder: Boy's family 'in hiding' over online photos

Ana Kriégel's body was found in a disused house in Dublin

Lawyers for one of the two boys convicted of the murder of 14-year-old Ana Kriégel have told a court that material published online has forced his family into hiding.

The schoolgirl was murdered in Dublin on 14 May last year by the boys, known as Boy A and Boy B, who were 13 at the time.

One of the boys also sexually assaulted her.

Her body was found in a disused house in the south-west of the city.

• Who was murdered schoolgirl Ana Kriégel?

On Thursday morning, a lawyer told Dublin's Central Criminal Court that the family of Boy B had been forced into hiding because of Twitter and Facebook posts revealing his identity.

The court has previously granted injunctions to the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), ordering the two companies to take down any material identifying the boys.

The DPP was also given permission to give notice to Facebook and Twitter that she was bringing proceedings against them for contempt of court.

The 14-year-old boys cannot be identified because they are children.

Lawyers for the other convicted boy, who was found guilty of murder and aggravated sexual assault, said they had brought a number of printouts of screenshots to court. These are also being examined by the prosecution.

Ana was adopted from Russia when she was two by Irish woman Geraldine Kriégel and her French-born husband Patric

The judge said those uploading material should be clear about the seriousness of what they are doing.

He said a central concern of the judiciary before this trial began was that "some idiots" on social media would breach the court's orders and it had come to pass.

He also said he was shocked to hear that an innocent child had been wrongfully identified on social media as being one of the two convicted boys and that a school had been targeted as well.

'Violating standards'

Both Twitter and Facebook were represented in court on Thursday morning. Lawyers for each of them said they had sworn affidavits in response to the DPP's application.

A spokesperson for Facebook said: "As soon as we became aware of content identifying Boy A and Boy B being shared on Facebook, we removed this content immediately for violating our community standards and local law.

"We also applied our photo-matching technology to prevent this content from being re-shared on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger. We will continue to remove this content from our platforms."