A murderer who dressed in a "killing suit" before battering a grandfather to death in the mistaken belief he was a paedophile has been jailed for life.

Brian Kearney, 21, donned a dark, hooded jacket and a joiner's belt filled with deadly weapons before cycling to a deserted barn where he launched the deadly attack on Barry Sewell, 49.

Newcastle Crown Court heard how he repeatedly battered Mr Sewell's head with hammers, used a bar to smash his kneecaps and shins and dropped 15kg breeze blocks on his head before ramming a metal pole so hard into his anus it almost came out of his abdomen.

At the sentencing hearing yesterday Judge David Hodson said: "The attack you mounted on Mr Sewell was about as ferocious and as savage and as sustained an attack I think I have ever heard.

"You used such a severe degree of force that almost the entire contents of his head had been extruded."

Prosecutor Brian Forster QC had told the court how Kearney targeted Mr Sewell, whose wife had died of cancer some years earlier, in the mistaken belief he was a paedophile.

Mr Forster said: "It came into his mind his mistaken belief that he thought this man was a paedophile."

Judge Hodson said he was satisfied Kearney's belief had "absoultely no substance whatsoever" and was completely false.

The court heard how after the savage killing Kearney tried to cover his tracks by contacting police and telling them: "You had better get down here, I've just found a body with its head stoved in".

When officers arrived at the barn, near the River Wear in Low Southwick, Sunderland, they found Mr Sewell's battered and lifeless body lying face-down on the ground with no trousers on.

Mr Forster said: "He had been subject to a ferocious and sustained attack which had cauased his death.

Read the full story in Friday's Northern Echo.