British banker convicted unanimously of murders in which Sumarti Ningsih and Seneng Mujiasih were raped and tortured in 2014

A British banker who killed two Indonesian women in Hong Kong after three days of cocaine- and alcohol-fuelled torture and rape has been found guilty of their murders.



Jutting's victims: how two Indonesian women met their deaths in Hong Kong Read more

Rurik Jutting, 31, a Cambridge-educated employee at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, killed Sumarti Ningsih and Seneng Mujiasih in 2014 after meeting them at bars in the city’s red-light district, a jury found unanimously.

He was sentenced to serve two concurrent life sentences.

Jutting showed no emotion after the verdict was read, sitting silently in the dock at the back of the courtroom. There was fleeting applause from supporters of the victims.

“My actions were horrific even by the standards of homicide trials,” Jutting said in a written statement read to the court by his lawyer. “The jury has delivered a verdict that I cannot and do not have any objection to.

“I remain haunted daily by my actions. The evil I have inflicted can never be remedied by me, neither words nor actions.”

To the two victims’ families he expressed remorse: “I am sorry, I am sorry beyond words.”

He had claimed diminished responsibility for the killings, which he filmed on his iPhone. Tim Owen QC, the British lawyer defending Jutting, had argued the accused suffered from a personality disorder.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sumarti Ningsih, left, and Seneng Mujiasih, right, were killed by Rurik Jutting in Hong Kong in 2014. Photograph: -

Handing down two life sentences, Judge Michael Stuart-Moore said: “During this trial we have been made to dredge the very depths of depravity during the three days of torture he subjected his first victim to.

“He described himself as evil and a monster, and neither is adequate to describe the true nature of what happened. The defendant is the archetypal sexual predator.”

Jutting showed no emotion as the judge recounted the details of his crimes, his head tipped slightly to one side, eyes staring at the floor.

The judge paid particular attention to Jutting’s comfortable upbringing, saying his salary and job were things most people “only dream of”.

“The defendant has shown not a shred of remorse, and the statement read this afternoon was the only time I have ever heard him say sorry, and I don’t accept it,” Stuart-Moore said.

Jutting’s lawyers plan to file for transfer to prison in the UK, but Stuart-Moore said he would ensure the courts in England knew the extent of his crimes, adding: “If this had been in the UK I would make sure this is a full life term, but I have no such power here.”

Supporters from the International Migrants Alliance were outside court, but no members of the victims’ families were present, as they could not afford to make the journey from rural Indonesia.

Statements read by the prosecution before sentencing detailed the poverty in which the two women grew up and their hardships in the past two years.

“The family regrets allowing her to work,” the Mujiasih family statement said. “If she did not leave, she would have not died.”

In a separate statement, Ningsih’s family said: “This incident is a tragedy for our family. It’s hard for us to accept this reality.”

Both families called for severe punishment for Jutting.



Stuart-Moore had earlier told jurors not to let the heinousness of the crimes or sympathy for the victims cloud their judgment in deciding whether or not Jutting’s mental capacity was significantly impaired when he killed the two women.

“The point that he has an appalling private life is neither here nor there,” he told the jury, local media reported.

Ningsih, 23 and a mother-of-one, had sustained severe knife wounds to her neck and buttocks. The decomposing body of 29-year-old Mujiasih, thought to have been killed several days earlier, had been stuffed into a suitcase on the apartment’s balcony.

Jutting did not testify during his trial. But jurors were shown graphic footage, taken by Jutting on his mobile phone, in which he described how he had subjected Ningsih to three days of torture after she agreed to come to his apartment in exchange for “a large sum” of money.

“My name is Rurik Jutting. About five minutes ago, I just killed, murdered this woman,” he is heard saying at one point. “It’s Monday night. I’ve held her captive since early Saturday. I’ve raped her repeatedly, I tortured her, tortured her badly …

“I feel a bit sad because she was a good person, but I don’t really feel guilty.”

During the trial, toxicologist Lau Fei-lung told the court that at the time of the murders Jutting was “deeply addicted” to cocaine, consuming the equivalent of three uncut grams of the drug each day. He reportedly drank as many as four bottles of wine a day.

British banker Rurik Jutting tortured victim for three days, court told Read more

In the trial that began last month, Jutting told Hong Kong’s high court he was not guilty of murder, but pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

The defendant, who studied at the prestigious Winchester College followed by Peterhouse, Cambridge, also admitted a third charge of preventing the lawful burial of a body. He was not charged with rape or torture.

The banker disappeared from his work around the time of the murders. He left an automated reply on his work email that read: “I am out of the office. Indefinitely. For urgent inquiries, or indeed any inquiries, please contact someone who is not an insane psychopath.”



The killings cast a spotlight on the drastically different lives of Jutting and the two women. He was a wealthy, well-educated banker working in the city’s often decadent financial industry. Ningsih and Mujiasih were from poor villages in rural Indonesia and both first came to Hong Kong to work as domestic helpers.

Their brutal deaths focused attention on the hardships suffered by more than 340,000 mostly female domestic workers who have migrated to Asia’s main financial hub from places such as Indonesia and the Philippines.

According to one study, one in six are subjected to forced labour, working 71 hours a week and often suffering severe physical and mental abuse.