Killer called mother as girlfriend lay dead on the floor

Jevgeni Matjuhha said he lost control and did not remember all that had happened after Latvian Nadija Ondzule told him she’d had an abortion two days previously and the child had not been his.

She had been throwing his clothes from the wardrobe and was being rude to him.

“I completely lost control of myself. The next thing I remember when I came back to my senses I was on the sofa in the drawing room, the lounge part of the flat.”

He told Leeds Crown Court he realised something had happened and walked into the bedroom area of their home in Oddfellows Street, Mirfield, Dewsbury and saw Nadija lying on the floor.

“The first thing I saw was blood around her head area, I lent down and I checked her pulse and I couldn’t feel one. At this moment I was lost, I didn’t know what to do. I felt hysterical, I felt panicking. I didn’t know what to do.”

He told his counsel Tahir Khan QC he did not remember killing Nadija: “I have lost complete control of myself.”

The next thing he did was call his mother “so she could be ready if anybody came round”.

He said he did not tell her about the abortion but that he and Nadija had a quarrel and he had killed her. “She started crying first of all. She said ‘You can’t reverse what you have already done’ and that I would remain her son whatever I had done.”

Matjuhha said he told his mother he did not think he could live with it and asked her to forgive him if he took his own life.

He told the jury he tried to “visualise” what must have happened and assumed from the cut on Nadija’s nose that he had hit her in the face and from the bruises on her neck that he had strangled her, which he later told police.

Matjuhha, 23, denies murdering 36-year-old Ms Ondzule on January 20 this year but admits her manslaughter.

The jury has heard Matjuhha left the UK, flying to Amsterdam the next day and was subsequently returned from Estonia under an arrest warrant.

The prosecution claim he murdered in anger after his girlfriend may have told him the relationship was over and afterwards he looked up details of prostitutes in Amsterdam on the internet.

The trial continues.