A TEENAGER from Angola has been locked up for driving an axe into the head of a gang rival outside a Haringey courthouse.

Bienvenu Vangu was caught on camera wildly wielding a tomahawk-style axe at Highgate Magistrates Court as he attacked two teenage boys.

Prosecutor Jeffrey Israel said Vangu, a member of the Wood Green Young Guns, charged at the courthouse on September 1 and swung the axe at two 14-year-old boys from the rival Northumberland Park Killers.

A eyewitness captured the shocking scenes in Bishops Road on his phone, as Vangu landed several blows on the boys as they tried to flee, leaving a deep wound in the head of one of the victims.

Mr Israel told Wood Green Crown Court this morning: “He produced the axe and wielded above his head in the direction of three young men who were locked outside the court room.

“One slips on to the ground and the defendant wields four vicious, violent hacks of the axe on this young man's head.”

Vangu then chased another teenager across the road, and, Mr Israel said, “stands over him, raises the axe, and hits two hard blows on to the victim's back”.

The violence came after a “charged atmosphere” as rival teenagers arrived that morning to appear before the youth court.

Up to 30 teenagers eventually gathered goading each other, before Vangu, wearing a baseball cap and a scarf across his face, arrived clutching a plastic bag containing the rusty axe.

He first charged inside the court foyer, swinging the axe “without apparent regard for anyone else who may have been there”, the court heard.

Security guards locked the court to protect members of the public inside, but the two victims were trapped outside as Vangu launched his attack.

Vangu, who turned 18 in November, has a string of ten convictions already, for robbery, violence, and carrying a knife, and first appearing before the courts when he was just 14.

He was sent to live in the UK with his father from his native Angola aged ten, and the court was told his father is a strict disciplinarian.

Judge Fraser Morrison, sentencing, warned Vangu, from Grays in Essex, that his victims were lucky to have survived the attack.

He said: “I was a sustained attack in public, not only outside on a public highway where anybody could witness and be duly frightened, but in a public building where people are entitled to assume they can go about their business without being frightened witless as no doubt they would have been as you were wielding an axe.”

He jailed Vangu, who admitted wounding, attempted wounding, violent disorder, and possession of the axe, for six years, and ordered he be on licence for four years after his release from prison to protect the public.

And the judge added: “If you don't tow the line, you will be back in jail.”