A Hong Kong jury has convicted a British banker on two counts of murder in the 2014 killings of two Indonesian women in a gruesome case that shocked the Chinese financial hub.
The nine-person jury returned their unanimous verdicts in the High Court on Tuesday.
They found Rurik Jutting guilty of murder in the death of 23-year-old Sumarti Ningsih. Prosecutors said Jutting was using cocaine while he tortured her for three days and then slit her throat.
Jurors were shown graphic smartphone video clips of the torture filmed by Jutting, who stuffed her body inside a suitcase that he left on the balcony of his upscale apartment near Hong Kong’s famous Wan Chai red-light district.
The jury also found Jutting guilty of the murder of 26-year-old Seneng Mujiasih, who was killed days later.
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.
