HONG KONG – British banker Rurik Jutting calmly detailed to police his cocaine-fuelled descent into a torture and killing binge that ended in the deaths of two Indonesian women in his luxury Hong Kong apartment, according to videos shown in court on Wednesday.

The 31-year-old Cambridge graduate told police that six weeks after he started buying cocaine directly from a dealer, he was vastly indulging in the drug, as well as alcohol and paid sex.

On the third day of his murder trial, the prosecution said Jutting was consuming 10 grams of 30-percent pure cocaine a day, an unbelievably high dosage. An expert toxicologist said in the courtroom around three grams could be fatal.

Read also: Hong Kong murder accused Jutting ‘deeply addicted to cocaine’

Jutting has admitted killing Sumarti Ningsih, a 23-year-old single mother, and another Indonesian woman, Seneng Mujiasih, 26, in his apartment two years ago.

But he has pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility, while pleading guilty to the lesser crime of manslaughter.

He explained in the video how cocaine made him feel sexually charged and led to him fantasising for long periods of time. He had tried cocaine previously but only fleetingly, he said.

Later in the interviews, when describing the first killing, Jutting bent over to show how he slit the throat of first victim, Ningsih, whom he previously met through a classifieds website. “Initially I didn’t cut deeply enough, I cut the windpipe but only a vein … she was bleeding on the floor. Then I pulled her into my shower and used the knife to cut as deeply as I could and then she died within a few minutes,” he said in the video that was viewed by a packed court room.

Read also: Hong Kong double murder: Graphic torture video to be shown to jury

Jutting filmed himself torturing and killing one of his victims, part of mobile phone footage taken from four hours of recordings in which he veered between boasting, remorse and describing the pleasure he derived from sexually brutalizing the women.

When describing the second killing in a video, Jutting explained how he met Mujiasih in a bar near his home and agreed to pay her HK$12,000 (S$2,150) to go back to his apartment, just a few minutes walk from the city’s red-light district.

He said he killed her within 20 minutes of her entering his apartment. Again motioning to the two officers present in one police video, he showed how he used his right hand to cut her throat and his left to hold her head. “I don’t recall how long it took her to die. I think at one point, while she was still alive, I went out onto the balcony … I was naked and covered in her blood and lay on the balcony for some point of time,” he said.

Hong Kong police grill British trader over double murder

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Reuters, AFP

“SHE WAS PREY”

Jutting said he didn’t sleep in between the two killings, which was a period of around five days. He instead took copious amounts of cocaine and read and watched extreme pornography which included violence and rape.

He detailed how he met his second victim in a bar called New Makati, a place where he said it was known that sex workers were available. “She was prey – I was in a mode I can only describe as hunting,” Jutting said.

In the police interviews conducted on November 2, 2014, a day after Jutting was arrested, he went into great detail over what had happened, politely relaying the course of events and appearing jovial at times.

Jutting, who also studied at Winchester, one of Britain’s most famous and oldest private schools, worked at Bank of America Corp in Hong Kong prior to his arrest.

During the police interviews he said he resigned shortly after killing Ningsih, sending an email to notify the bank, before later attempting to “clean the bathroom” where his first victim died.

Bank of America declined to comment when contacted by Reuters on Wednesday.

Read also: UK banker on double murder charge grins leaving HK court

Dressed in a navy blue shirt, Jutting appeared attentive during the court session on Wednesday as he listened to the videos.

In one video, he said he had “mutual sexual relations” with Ningsih at a hotel near his flat during a six-day period when he had a string of “sex workers” visit him.

The second time he met her he agreed to pay HK$8,000-HK$10,000 for her to spend the night with him, an encounter that ultimately turned into three days of torture.

Jutting, a former vice president and head of Structured Equity Finance & Trading (Asia) at Bank of America, had expressed “job depression” in his series of monologues that he termed the “narcissistic ramblings of Rurik Jutting.” Jutting was accused of murder in October 2014.

Read also: British banker’s torture video stuns jury in Hong Kong murder trial

Police said they received a call from the then 29-year-old, requesting officers to come to his apartment, where they found the bodies of the two women.

Ningsih, who had a son in Indonesia, was visiting Hong Kong on a tourist visa. Her mutilated body was discovered inside a suitcase on Jutting’s balcony, while Mujiasih, a domestic helper, was found lying inside with wounds to her neck and buttocks, forensic pathologist Dr Poon Wai-ming testified in court.

The defence and prosecution were largely in agreement over the physical evidence, Judge Michael Stuart-Moore had advised the jurors on the first day of the trial.

He told them the verdict could rest on psychiatric and psychological testimony.

Murder carries a mandatory life sentence, while manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of life.

The case continues.

TAIPEI – Hostages were forced to eat mice, scorpions and centipedes to survive during the nearly five years they were held by Somali pirates, according to a Taiwanese seafarer who arrived home Wednesday.

Shen Jui-chang, among 26 hostages freed from the crew of Naham 3 seized south of the Seychelles in March 2012, added he had constantly had a gun pointed at his head during his ordeal.

Shen, the chief engineer on the fishing boat, was reunited with his wife and daughter on Tuesday in Guangzhou, southern China, after a long flight from Kenya with Chinese crew members after they were freed Sunday.

An emotional Shen arrived at Taipei’s main airport on Wednesday afternoon and said he was in “very poor physical health”.

“Every day was nerve-wracking, with the pirates pointing their AK-47 rifles at me 24 hours a day,” the frail-looking sailor told reporters.

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Somali pirates forced sailors of hijacked Taiwanese vessel to eat mice, scorpions

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Shen had earlier told reporters the hostages were given little to eat during their four-and-a-half years in captivity and were sometimes denied water.

Shen and the other men often caught and ate mice, scorpions and centipedes, according to Taiwanese media reports.

The crew, which also included seafarers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Cambodia, were taken hostage at the peak of Somali piracy.

Only one other crew of fishermen spent longer in the hands of Somali pirates.

Three hostages died during the hijacking, including the Taiwanese captain who Shen said was shot when he attacked the pirates with a chair.

Taiwan’s government has been criticised for not doing enough to secure the hostages’ release, but the foreign ministry said Tuesday that efforts by the countries involved in the negotiations should be recognised.

Captured & beaten by pirates

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The Straits Times, Internet screengrabs

TOKYO – A Japanese court on Wednesday ordered millions of dollars compensation be paid to families of children swept out to sea by a massive 2011 tsunami.

The Sendai District Court in northern Japan ruled two local governments must pay a combined 1.43 billion yen ($13.7 million) to 29 plaintiffs – parents of 23 children who were killed in the disaster – according to a court spokesman.

The victims, from the public Okawa Elementary School in the city of Ishinomaki, were among a total of 74 children who perished in rising waters after being told to wait for more than 40 minutes at the school grounds with teachers, 10 of whom also died.

The plaintiffs had demanded that Ishinomaki and the larger Miyagi prefecture of which it is a part pay a total of 2.3 billion yen in compensation, arguing that their children would have survived if they had evacuated to a hill just behind the school rather than waiting.

“The teachers were able to predict the massive tsunami would reach the school,” presiding judge Kenji Takamiya was quoted as saying by Jiji Press.

Public broadcaster NHK showed family members rushing towards cameras outside the court in the city of Sendai after the verdict was announced. One of them held up a banner reading, “We won: Our children’s voices were heard.” “Why did my son have to die?,” Kazutaka Sato, one of the parents, told NHK.

Reviving lost businesses in tsunami-hit Japan

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Republic Polytechnic, Singapore Red Cross

“I still ask this question although more than five years have passed since the disaster.

“I want teachers in Ishinomaki to understand how terrified my son must have been.” In response to the verdict, Ishinomaki Mayor Hiroshi Kameyama told reporters he takes the ruling “seriously”, adding the city will decide as soon as possible whether or not to appeal.

In 2013, the same court ordered a kindergarten pay a combined 170 million yen in damages to parents of four children who died after being put on a bus that drove towards the incoming tsunami.

A massive undersea quake on March 11, 2011, sent a giant tsunami barrelling into Japan’s northeastern coast, leaving more than 18,500 people dead or missing, and sending three reactors into meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

It was Japan’s worst postwar disaster and the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986.

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AFP, Reuters