A man who fatally stabbed his heavily pregnant girlfriend with a pair of scissors has been jailed for life.

Ioan Campeanu, 44, plunged the blade into 28-year-old Andra Hilitanu’s neck and waited two hours to raise the alarm on 1 June last year.

He drove around central London past Buckingham Palace before returning to his flat in north-west London and calling 999, the Old Bailey heard.

The court was told Hilitanu’s 40 stab injuries were all “survivable” and it could have taken more than 20 minutes for her to die.

Campeanu was found guilty of murdering his seven-months pregnant girlfriend and the destruction of their unborn daughter.

He was jailed for life with a minimum term of 26 years, with 14 years for the death of the child to run concurrently.

Andra Hilitanu was seven months pregnant when she was killed. Photograph: Metropolitan police/PA

Sentencing, Mr Justice Jacobs said Hilitanu, who had two children, suffered a “horrible” death, alone and far from her home country.

She suffered 40 stab wounds, including four to the neck, as well as other blunt force injuries during the 25-minute attack in her Neasden flat.

The judge rejected Campeanu’s claim that his victim had inflicted wounds on her pelvis herself because she did not want her baby.

He told Campeanu: “This was a prolonged and brutal attack in which you showed her no mercy. The terror and agony she must have suffered are awful to contemplate.”

Earlier in mitigation, Michael Bromley-Martin QC said: “I described this as a horror case and a lesson perhaps in the dreadful end of the inevitable spiral caused by addiction to drugs and in particular to cocaine.”

He said the defendant was in such a confused state after stabbing his girlfriend that he “had it in his mind to visit Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen for medical assistance”.

Brian O’Neill QC, for the prosecution, said “self-induced intoxication” was no mitigation and pointed out Campeanu had denied any mental health problems when he was seen by two social workers the day before the killing.

The trial had heard the killing came after years of domestic violence at the hands of the defendant, who was brought up in a “brutal” Romanian orphanage.

He had previous convictions in Romania and Britain for robbery, theft and criminal damage, using crime to finance his drug addiction.

Hilitanu was one of four siblings who were brought closer together by the death of their parents early in life.

Her older sister Ramona said in a victim-impact statement that Andra’s “future was taken away in a cruel manner”.

She said: “I do not hate Ioan Campeanu. I am not a hateful person. I am sad at what he has done. I am also frustrated at the way in which he left Andra to die.

“Ioan Campeanu could have sought help from so many sources and yet chose to do nothing. I will never be able to forget this fact.”