A 7 year old boy was beaten to death by staff member at a top Catholic Primary School for taking too long to use toilet.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) was told Aldo Moroni was punished for taking too long to use the toilet.

A former pupil, using the name Edward, said he had been told that Aldo, who died in 1980, had been ‘killed’ at St Columba’s College in Largs, Ayrshire.

Edward, 64, said Aldo died after a beating by a religious brother called Brother Germanus – real name David McKell.

A hearing in Edinburgh heard that Edward was at the school in the 1960s, and was sexually abused on dozens of occasions by McKell.

In 2014, Edward’s nephew, also a former pupil, told him he was at St Columba’s when Aldo had been ‘killed’, telling him: ‘It haunts me to this day.’

Edward said: ‘Aldo Moroni, a little boy, was getting a vicious beating on the landing outside the toilet for supposedly being in the toilet too long.

‘[My nephew said] there was screaming and holy murder going on; it got worse, and the next thing we [the nephew and his classmates] knew, there’s an ambulance there, and the next thing we knew we are at a funeral in Dunoon – Aldo was dead.’

Senior counsel to the inquiry Colin MacAulay QC said according to Edward’s testimony, his nephew ‘drew a link between the beating happening and the death’.

Edward said he was ‘dumbfounded’ by the news, and that his nephew had told him the children were informed at the time that Aldo had died after a heart attack.