Daily Times

A British banker jailed for life for the horrifying murder of two Indonesian women at his upscale Hong Kong apartment in a cocaine-fuelled rampage has had his appeal rejected, a court ruled Friday.
Cambridge University graduate Rurik Jutting tortured Sumarti Ningsih for three days — filming parts of her ordeal on his phone — before slashing her throat with a serrated knife and stuffing her body into a suitcase. Days later, with Ningsih’s corpse still on his balcony, the former Bank of America Merrill Lynch worker picked up Seneng Mujiasih, intending to play out the same fantasies. But he killed her quickly when she started screaming. Jutting, now 32, had pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility but was found guilty of murder, with the judge at the time describing the killings as “sickening in the extreme”. Jutting’s defence team had argued that judge Michael Stuart-Moore repeatedly gave incorrect directions to the jury during the trial last year when explaining how they should determine whether Jutting’s state of mind had impaired his responsibility for his actions.

Published in Daily Times, February  10^th 2018.