“If you say yes, I’ll hit you once.”
“If you say no, I’ll hit you twice,” former British banker Rurik Jutting is heard telling an Indonesian woman in horrifying videos played to a Hong Kong jury on Tuesday.
Jutting, 31, is being tried for the murder of two Indonesian women, 23-year-old Sumarti Ningsih and 26-year-old Seneng Mujiasih, in Hong Kong in 2014.
On the tapes, Jutting can be heard threatening Ningsih, telling her not to cry and describing inflicting sexual and physical violence on her.
In total, 43 videos found on Jutting’s iPhone were played one after the other in court for three hours on Tuesday. Some were only played as audio because of the graphic content, while others were shown to the jury and public in their entirety.
“If you scream, I will punish you, do you understand?” he asks her at one point.
While it was being played, the court room was completely silent — some members of the public averted their eyes when Jutting showed Ningsih’s body in one of the videos.
‘My name is Rurik Jutting … I just killed’
Both women’s bodies were found in Jutting’s upscale apartment in November 2014, one sprawled on the floor and the other stuffed in a suitcase on the balcony.
The first recordings, only played in their entirety to the jury, were made during Jutting’s three-day torture of Ningsih before he slit her throat, prosecutors say.
During the tapes, Rurik varied between calling Ningsih a “good girl” and asking if she loved him, to demanding to know if she wanted him to “spike” her.
The later videos, replayed in full to the public, showed Jutting filming himself, apparently after Ningsih’s death, saying, “My name is Rurik Jutting, about five minutes ago I just killed, murdered… oh shit.”
Speaking into his iPhone camera, he described how he raped and tortured her. “I cut her throat in the bathroom,” he adds.
When the videos were shown in court, Jutting closed his eyes and remained silent.
At least 26 small plastic bags of cocaine were found in his apartment, documents shared by the court showed.
Jutting pleading not guilty to murder
Although he has admitted to killing both Ningsih and Mujiasih, Jutting pleaded not guilty to murder on Monday.
He claimed diminished responsibility, meaning he had not been in his right mind at the time, and instead pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter.
But the prosecution did not accept his plea and instead pushed ahead with a murder trial. If found guilty, he faces life in prison.
In their opening statement, the prosecution said that Jutting had filmed the torture of Ningsih on his iPhone after he paid her to come up to his apartment for sex.
Four days after killing Ningsih, he brought Mujiasih, the second woman, up to his apartment, according to court documents.
Prosecutors said she tried to escape and was killed when she refused to stop shouting.
