This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A City banker has been found guilty of murdering a woman he bludgeoned to death with a pestle on her 29th birthday.

Zahid Naseem struck Christina Abbotts 13 times on the back of the head with the large ceramic utensil. She was hit about 30 times in total while housesitting a flat for a friend in Crawley, West Sussex.

The jury of eight men and four women took about four hours to return the verdict at Lewes crown court on Thursday. Naseem, 48, is due to be sentenced on Friday by judge Christine Laing.

The victim, who was born in the West Midlands, was described as a socialite who led a party lifestyle in London, mixing with wealthy friends, and telling relatives she worked in IT.

But secretly she advertised her services on an adult site under the pseudonym Tilly Pexton.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Christina Abbotts, 29, who was found dead after friends raised the alarm when she failed to turn up for her own birthday party in London. Photograph: Sussex police/PA

Naseem was working for Toronto-Dominion bank’s London office when he found her profile offering overnight rates from £1,000. The pair were last seen in public on the evening of 24 May when Naseem met her in Crawley before spending the night together.

CCTV showed him standing in an Asda supermarket aisle kissing her on the forehead as they bought champagne. Worried friends started searching for her when she failed to turn up to her birthday party in South Kensington, west London, the next day.

Police found her body after forcibly entering the flat in the early hours of the morning on 26 May. They discovered Naseem pretending to be unconscious in the next room, lying on a sofa surrounded by half-drunk glasses of alcohol, drugs paraphernalia and underwear.

Paramedics were convinced he was play-acting; he woke up fully when he was arrested in hospital, claiming to have no idea what happened.

The freelance risk-management consultant, who earned up to £250,000 a year and had previously worked for investment bank Merrill Lynch, initially said he could not remember the incident and did not know how Abbotts died when he was interviewed by police.

When he gave evidence in court, he admitted striking Abbotts but said it was in self-defence as he feared she was strangling him to death in a sex game gone wrong. He also said a “red mist” may have come over him.

But Christopher Tehrani, prosecuting, dismissed his testimony as “nonsense” and a “pack of lies”, telling Naseem he carried on “relentlessly” during the “savage” attack.

He said Naseem stayed in the flat for 12 hours after Abbotts’ death – drinking, taking drugs and sending pornographic pictures and videos to other escorts.

Naseem told police he did not call for help when he realised Abbotts was dead because he “couldn’t see anything positive” coming out of the situation. He could not explain how the pestle – coupled with a mortar bowl later found in the flat’s kitchen by officers – came to be in the bedroom.

The father of two, who lives in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, told the court he turned to escorts when the “whirlwind romance” with his partner fizzled out and they grew apart.

For the best part of a decade he hired sex workers, drank on an almost daily basis and took cocaine, telling the court the behaviour was common in the financial district.