A Hong Kong jury has found British banker Rurik Jutting guilty of murdering two Indonesian women that he confessed to killing in his luxury apartment two years ago.
Tuesday's unanimous decision marked the end of a trial that attracted global attention due to graphic video and the brutality of the killings in a city where serious crime is rare.
Jutting, 31, had pleaded not guilty to murdering Sumarti Ningsih, 23, and Seneng Mujiasih, 26, in 2014 on grounds of "diminished responsibility" due to alcohol and drug abuse and sexual disorders. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Jutting faces a mandatory life sentence. He had pleaded not guilty to murder when the trial began two weeks ago but had 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.
Rutting, a 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 come back to his apartment to have sex.
Seneng was in Hong Kong on a tourist visa after an earlier stay as a foreign maid. 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.
Jutting's lawyer read a statement from the ex-banker saying he accepted the sentence and that he was haunted by his actions and the pain he brought the families.
He said: "They've delivered a verdict that I cannot and will not have an objection with ... I accept this as a just and appropriate judgment.
"The evil I have inflicted can never be remedied by me in words or by action."
Justice Michael Stuart-Moore, questioned the sincerity of Jutting's statement as he handed down the life sentences, saying the case "must rank as one of the most horrifying cases that have come to the courts of Hong Kong."
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