A man accused of killing a teenage colleague "thought he was taking a breather" when he found him unconscious, a court heard.

Dean Reynolds, 23, denied starting up an oil rig cable pulling machine while 17-year-old Michael McLean was inside it.

He said he walked into a building at Denholm MacNamee's industrial cleaning and painting facility in Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, and found the boy lying on the floor.

Giving evidence in his own defence, Reynolds told the High Court in Aberdeen he thought Mr McLean "was taking a breather" when he found him unconscious.

Mr McLean died following the incident on August 14, 2015 - the last day of his summer job at the firm.

The trial earlier heard how Mr McLean was found unconscious and bleeding from the ears on the floor of a paint shed.

His father - who also worked at the firm - frantically tried to give him CPR before he was rushed to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary where he died six days later.

The court was told that a post-mortem examination found that Michael had suffered a broken vertebrae in his neck, which caused a tear in his spinal cord leading to cardiac arrest which starved his brain of oxygen.

On Thursday, his advocate Iain Duguid QC asked Reynolds how he felt in the moments after he made the discovery.

He said: "My mind was all over the place - I didn't know what I had seen. I was shocked and scared.

"Everything was going so slow - my mind was going slow."

Mr Duguid QC asked: "Did you think he was badly injured?"

Reynolds replied: "No - he just looked unconscious."

He later told the court he had sent messages to his partner about the incident in which he said he was "s******g myself".

Asked why he had written that, Reynolds added: "Because I was scared of what I'd seen."

Reynolds, of Keith, Aberdeenshire, denies culpable homicide.

At the close of the prosecution case, advocate depute Richard Goddard withdrew a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice by discarding two pairs of work boots.

He also deleted an alternative charge under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974.

The trial continues.