Three Asian youths hailing from Pakistan have been sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of murder of a white teenager in Peterborough, England, soon after the September 11 attacks in the US.

The three, Ahmed Ali Awan (21), Shaied Nazir (22) and Sarfraz Ali (25) pounced on Ross Parker (17) as he walked with his girl friend Nicola Toms, along a dim cycleway in Peterborough after finishing work, and attacked him with a chemical spray, a hammer and foot-long hunting knife.

The attackers told Toms to flee as it was against their "code of honour" to harm a woman.

After Ross Parker had been beaten with a hammer and fatally stabbed, one of his attackers held up a bloodied knife and said: "Look at this -- cherish the blood."

The five-week trial at Northampton Crown Court had heard that Awan, managing director of a labour contracting firm, stabbed Parker to show his "superiority" over others in the gang.

Sentencing the three men to life, Sir Edwin Jowett, sitting as a deputy high court judge, said: "You put your heads together with the purpose of arming yourselves and of attacking an innocent man you might find by chance simply because he was of a different race to yourselves. A racist killing must be one of the gravest kinds of killing."

Nazir, nicknamed Biggy, was a door-to-door sales representative for a power company. He admitted being present when Ross was attacked. He said he had kicked him a couple of times and had tried to spray the chemical spray gas but had ended up spraying himself. He denied being party to any plan to kill.