A man has been jailed for life for stabbing his ex-girlfriend to death after she began dating a mutual friend.



Grzegorz Kosiec, 23, stabbed Karolina Chwiluk, 20, a Westminster University architecture student, on the evening of 4 May.

Kosiec, a labourer from Poland, stabbed Chwiluk repeatedly with a kitchen knife in Mile End, east London, as his flatmates tried to intervene.

At the Old Bailey, the prosecutor Tom Kark said: “This was no doubt a frenzied and violent attack and she had no chance to defend herself.”

Chwiluk, who worked part-time as a waiter at the Polish embassy, suffered 26 wounds, including to her face and neck.

The defendant said he loved Chwiluk and had only wanted to see her that day to talk.

Karolina Chwiluk ‘had enormous potential and would have changed the world for the better’, her stepmother said. Photograph: Facebook

The court heard that the couple had been together for three years and split up three weeks before the murder. Chwiluk began seeing a mutual friend a week before her death.

She said they had separated because of the defendant’s inability to control his aggressive behaviour when he had been drinking alcohol.

Kosiec had pleaded guilty to her murder and wounding Dawid Czerwiwski, 24, and Monika Fijak, 42.

On his arrest, Kosiec said he had not hurt anyone else on purpose and only did it because they were trying to pull him off, the court heard.

Mitigating, Peter Doyle QC said the killing was a “spontaneous act” and “vicious and sustained attack on the woman he loved”.

“No doubt losing Karolina to someone who was a mutual friend plainly played in his mind. There is evidence he tried to rationalise what happened. At no stage has he sought to malign Karolina in any way and it is not part of my task to suggest this is anything other than the most tragic case.

“For the defendant, it was his first experience of the love and affection of a woman. Their relationship, when it went well, was both loving and positive. Because he was at the time the worse for drink he never understood what he had done to lose her and what he could do to try and win her back.”

In a victim impact statement, Chwiluk’s stepmother, Anna Machala, said: “She knew what was important in life. She knew how to get it. She worked hard to get into university. She had an enormous potential and would have changed the world for the better.

“Her senseless death changed our lives. We miss her so much.”

Jailing Kosiec for at least 20 years, the judge, Mark Lucraft QC, said: “The killing of Karolina was motivated by jealousy and the fact she had made clear the relationship was over.”