A MAN who is HIV-positive injected his wife with his blood while she slept, infecting her with the virus that causes AIDS.

It is believed the New Zealand man wanted to give her the disease so she would have sex with him again. She told police he also hoped it would prevent her from finding another man and leaving him.

The man, 35, is in prison awaiting sentence for wilfully infecting another with a disease, an offence that carries a maximum jail term of 14 years.

The couple cannot be identified. In court documents, the woman, 33, described how her husband twice pricked her with a sewing needle laced with his infected blood as she slept and how she once caught him handling a syringe full of his blood.

In the year before the man pricked his now-estranged wife, the couple had been experiencing relationship problems, in part because she refused to have sex with him because she feared she would contract the disease.