A man who stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death with a pair of scissors and left her to die while he went to "visit the Queen", has been jailed for life.

Ioan Campeanu plunged the blades into 28-year-old Andra Hilitanu’s neck four times and then went for a drive around central London past Buckingham Palace.

The 44-year-old eventually returned to their flat in Neasden, northwest London, where he called 999 two hours after he left Ms Hilitanu to die alone on 1 June last year, London's Old Bailey heard.

The mother-of-two's 40 stab injuries were all “survivable” and that it was possible it could have taken more than 20 minutes for her to die, the court was told.

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

He will serve a minimum term of 26 years behind bars for Ms Hilitanu’s murder, as well as 14 years to run concurrently for the death of their child.

Sentencing him, Mr Justice Jacobs said Ms Hilitanu suffered a “horrible” death, alone and far from her home country.

The senior judge rejected Campeanu’s claim that his victim had inflicted wounds on her pelvis herself because she did not want her baby, telling Campeanu: “This was a prolonged and brutal attack in which you showed her no mercy. The terror and agony which she must have suffered are awful to contemplate.”

Ioan Campeanu, 44, was jailed for life on 10 January, 2019, after stabbing his pregnant girlfriend Andra Hilitanu to death with a pair of scissors at the couple's flat in Neasden, northwest London, on 1 June, 2018. (PA)

Earlier in mitigation, Campeanu's defence barrister 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 as state after stabbing his girlfriend that he “had it in his mind to visit Buckingham Palace to ask the Queen for medical assistance”.

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

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The trial 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 England for robbery, theft and criminal damage, using crime to finance his drug addiction.

Ms Hilitanu was one of four siblings who were brought close together following the death of their parents early in life.