Asia-Pacific

British banker convicted of murdering two women in Hong Kong

Rurik Jutting says punishment ‘appropriate’ for killing of two Indonesian women in 2014

Rurik George Caton Jutting: Police found the bodies of two women in his Hong Kong apartment. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

Tue Nov 8 2016 - 09:05

A British banker facing life in jail after being convicted of torturing and murdering two Indonesian women in Hong Kong has said he is sorry and accepted the verdicts as "just and appropriate punishment".

Rurik Jutting was found guilty by a nine-person jury at the High Court after a two-week trial in a gruesome case which shocked the Chinese financial hub.

Details of the killings of 23-year-old Sumarti Ningsih and Seneng Mujiasih (26) in 2014 which emerged during the hearing highlighted Hong Kong’s significant inequality as well as the decadent lifestyles of some members of the former British colony’s expatriate elite.

Jutting faces a mandatory life sentence.

READ MORE

In a statement his lawyer asked to be read into the court record, the 31-year-old apologised and accepted the verdicts as “just and appropriate punishment”. He also said he was haunted by his actions and the pain he had caused to the women’s loved ones.

Jurors were shown graphic smartphone video clips filmed by Jutting in which he tortured Ms Sumarti while using cocaine before slitting her throat. He then stuffed her body inside a suitcase that he left on the balcony of his luxury apartment near Hong Kong’s famous Wan Chai red-light district.

He killed Ms Seneng three days later.

Jutting had denied murder and attempted to plead guilty to manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility. Prosecutors rejected that argument but the jury could have considered it on its own.

The Cambridge University graduate was working at the Hong Kong office of Bank of America-Merrill Lynch in structured equity finance and trading at the time of the killings.

He had offered both women large sums of money to go to his apartment to have sex.

Ms Seneng was in Hong Kong on a tourist visa after an earlier stay as a foreign maid. Ms Sumarti was officially on a maid visa but was working at a bar.

They were among Hong Kong's more than 300,000 migrant domestic workers, most of them women from Indonesia or the Philippines.

AP

LATEST STORIES