HAYLEY MURDER TRIAL: HAYLEY Richards was innocent of any fault and did not provoke her boyfriend into killing her, a court heard.

Accused murderer Hugo Quintas took a knife to his pregnant girlfriend's house in order to kill her, the jury at Bristol Crown Court were told. Quintas, 24, of Seymour Court, Trowbridge, denies murdering Hayley Richards on June 11 but has pleaded guilty to her manslaughter on the grounds of provocation.

The jury sitting at Bristol Crown Court have heard he lost his self-control when Miss Richards told him she had slept with another man. He then used a craft knife to cut her throat. He claimed he had grabbed the knife from a drawer but prosecutor Mark Evans QC suggested the knife had been brought from Quintas' home.

Summing up the prosecution's case on Monday, Mr Evans said: "We are concerned with the tragic death of Hayley Richards who we say is innocent of any fault." Mr Evans said to suggest she was to blame for the attack was "grossly unfair and grossly untrue."

"We submit this was a calculated, callous killing of an innocent young girl and then Quintas then made his escape and would have kept up trying to make his escape had he not been caught by Spanish police," he said.

Mr Evans said as well as having her throat cut there were other cuts found on Miss Richards which were even and parallel, suggesting they were not inflicted by a man acting out of control. He also suggested when Miss Richards was dead Quintas had placed two of her rings on her body as a parting gesture. Mr Evans said Quintas had gone to extraordinary lengths during the trial to try to blacken Miss Richard's character by claiming she had infected him with two sexually transmitted diseases.

Quintas told the court he caught chlamydia and gonorrhoea from her but tests proved this was very unlikely because Miss Richards did not have gonorrhoea. In his summing up Paul Garlick QC, defending Quintas, said his client had killed Miss Richards because she had provoked him and he had lost his self control.

He said: "How many of us can truly say that at some time we have not lost control and have not done things we would never ordinarily do and looked back in shame. The thing with provocation is it does cause people to act in uncontrollable way often excessively brutal."

He said although his client had pleaded guilty to an assault on Miss Richards on June 5 this did not mean he was not provoked into killing her five days later. He said, on the contrary, this proved theirs was a stormy relationship.

Mr Garlick accepted Quintas had told numerous lies to the police in his initial defence statement but added that those lies did not prove his client was not provoked.