A murder trial jury has been shown a photo of the blood-stained body of a Polish teacher lying in her former partner’s garden with a kitchen knife beside her.
A police officer said an “incoherent” Mohammed Ali Abboud was found with a wound to his side and blood on the walls and floor of his Perthshire home shortly after neighbours discovered Agnieszka Szefler’s body outside.
Abboud, 57, denies killing the 27-year-old at Bridge of Earn’s Horsemill Place and has lodged a special defence of self-defence.
PC Niall Collin, 31, said he arrived at the scene at around 1.30pm and found Abboud in his living room.
“He was quite incoherent, but he was clutching his stomach,” Mr Collin said.
“He was hard to understand. He was wearing a blue polo shirt that had a small cut on the left hand side of it.
“It was quite bloodstained. There was a small puncture wound to the abdomen and a few scratch-like cuts.”
He added: “The house was in quite a mess. There were signs of a disturbance.
“There were items strewn about the place and blood-spattering across the walls in the hallway.”
DC Stuart Martin, 29, told the trial that when Abboud was cautioned later that day he replied: “I didn’t do anything, I tried to protect her.”
DC John Smith, 49, who secured the scene, said he and a pathologist conducted a “systematic examination” of Miss Szefler’s body in the garden.
He said: “She was then rolled over and a knife was found. It was lying under the torso.”
The jury was shown a photograph of Miss Szefler’s body with the knife beside it.
Photographs of a number of handwritten notes found in the house were also shown, one of which read: “Some people will only love you as much as they can. Use you and their loyalty where the benefits stop.”
Neighbour Wendy Clark, 43, told the trial she heard a noise that sounded “like cats fighting” at lunchtime on January 23.
Looking out her window, she saw Abboud returning to his house from the garden, where there was “something lying.”
She and her husband went round to Abboud’s where they were met by neighbour Daniel McIldowie, who was on the phone to police.
Mrs Clark said: “Dan asked me to go through to the back garden to see what we could do.”
Mrs Clark said there was a woman’s body lying there with no sign of life when she checked for a pulse.
She said the woman’s body was in the recovery position “lying on her side with her knees up.”
Mrs Clark said a “very erratic” Abboud was standing in the living room.
“He was all over the place, very fidgety,” she said.
“There was a lot of blood on the floor, on the walls in the hall, on the living room floor and the kitchen.”
Abboud, 57, denies biting Miss Szefler repeatedly on the body, striking her repeatedly on the body with a knife or similar instrument, pursuing and straddling her, and again striking her repeatedly with a knife or similar instrument on January 23 at Horsemill Place, Bridge of Earn.
Abboud is then alleged to have washed blood from the knife used in the crime, removed it from the position it was in and placed it under Miss Szefler’s body to give the appearance she had fallen on it.
It is then alleged that Abboud repeatedly struck himself on the body with a knife to give the appearance that he had been assaulted by Miss Szefler and that he did so to avoid detection, arrest and prosecution and attempted to defeat the ends of justice.
The trial before Lord Uist continues.