A former drug user was jailed for 10 years yesterday for killing a dealer after getting "wasted" on a cancer victim's medicine.

A judge told Donald Stone that he had committed a prolonged attack on a vulnerable man who was in poor health.

John Beckett, QC, said he was required to pass a sentence to mark the seriousness of the crime and "to deter you and others from killing in pursuit of drugs".

The judge told Stone, 24, at the High Court in Edinburgh: "It is plain the motive was for the theft of drugs." He also ordered that the killer should be kept under supervision for a further five years.

Stone, of Scott Place, Fauldhouse, in West Lothian, was originally charged with murdering Ian Thomson, but the Crown accepted his guilty plea to the reduced charge of culpable homicide.

He admitted repeatedly punching, kicking and stamping on the victim, binding his hands, tying him to a chair and robbing him of heroin and mobile phones.

Stone's 56-year-old victim died in hospital four days after the attack in Fauldhouse on December 5 last year.

Mr Thomson, who was known as Bones and weighed less than eight stones at the time of his death, suffered a punctured lung and broken ribs after the attack at his home in Ogilvy Crescent.

Advocate depute Gary Allan, QC, said: "It was the view of pathologists that the now deceased had been severely beaten and died as a consequence of having received blunt force trauma to the chest resulting in fatal pneumonia."