The teenage boy who raped and muderered six-year-old Alesha MacPhail on a Scottish island has been named as Aaron Campbell.

Judge Lord Matthews, who presided over his trial, agreed to lift a legal restriction on revealing the 16-year-old’s identity following an application by media organisations.

Under Scots law a convicted criminal cannot be identified until they turn 18 but such was the severity of the crime, that the judge has ruled that he could be identified.

The ruling came the day after he was found guilty  of Alesha’s murder at the High Court in Glasgow, where he attempted to blame 18-year-old Toni McLachlan, the girlfriend of Alesha’s father Robert MacPhail, for the murder.

Campbell took the schoolgirl from her bedroom, carried her along the shore in Rothesay on the Isle of Bute and left her “brutalised” body in woodland at the site of a derelict hotel.

The jury deliberated for around three hours before returning its verdict. The teen killer faces a mandatory life sentence.

Alesha’s mother Georgina Lochrane, who sat through the trial, issued a statement saying she could not express how devastated she was to have lost her “beautiful, happy, smiley wee girl”.

The six-year-old lived with her mother in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, but was on the holiday island in the Clyde to spend three weeks with her father and grandparents.