London: Philip Spence bludgeoned the three Emirati sisters with a view to killing them, prosecutor Simon Mayo said in his final arguments to jurors on Friday.

Khulood, 36, Ohoud, 34 and Fatima, 31, suffered fractured skulls and life-threatening injuries after being attacked with a hammer in the luxury Cumberland hotel in central London on April 6.

The heinous attack led to warnings by UAE embassy officials asking Emiratis to avoid central areas of London and to be wary of displaying any kind of wealth in public.

The prosecutor said Spence had decided that the women “must die” in the attack that went “against every civilised human instinct”.

However, in his final arguments, Spence’s defence counsel William Nash denied his client had any “murderous intention” and called it a “totally unplanned” attack.

Nash said Spence was carrying co-accused Neofitos ‘Thomas’ Efremi’s hammer in his jacket when he entered the hotel. “It is not disputed that Mr Spence had it on his person, the question you may wonder is initially why was it there. You have heard Mr Spence tell you that he had recently been attacked and badly injured by people that believed him to be indebted to them for drugs — something that you may feel is certainly plausible,” he added.

Prosecutor Mayo told jurors there were three core acts at the heart of the case. “Firstly, the blows were all aimed at the head, an area most likely to cause death if smashed with a hammer.

“Secondly, Spence used severe force and third, the fact that Spence delieverd at least 15 blows and used both ends of the hammer, including the claw end on Ohoud,” he said.

Fatima received at least three blows from the hammer, including two to her skull and one to her nose, Khulood received a minimum of six blows, including two to her skull and one in the eye and Ohoud received a minimum of six blows.

“We know that he [Spence] is a habitual criminal who had an addiction to Class A drugs,” Mayo said.

He reminded jurors that Spence had nearly flung a rolled-up magazine being used as a prop hammer during the trial.

Show of temper

“Even in this courtroom, with the eyes of the judge and the 12 jurors on him, he only just held back from launching that prop across the court — a glimpse of his temper, but a telling one nonetheless,” Mayo added.

Defending Spence’s actions, Nash pointed out that his client was known as a “hotel creeper” who entered hotel premises “in an attempt to do something without detection”.

“Whatever did happen that night you may think it was something that had a horrible sequence of coincidences attached to it and the main one was that there was a suite with an open door,” he said.

Nash said it was “implausible in the extreme” to think Spence could have known there would be “such an easy entrance” to the victims’ room.

“It therefore follows that that events of that night must be considered to be pretty well totally unplanned and unanticipated,” he said.

Nash said Spence entered the room to steal and “at that stage all the occupants of the room were asleep”.

Describing the series of events to the jurors, Nash said: “He is going in there, maybe creeping around, clearly his intention you may think at that point was to go in and get out and to get out without alerting the occupants of the room of his presence. It is a tragic fact that he failed in that endeavour ... you have heard that he resorted to the terrible use of that hammer.”

He added: “Was his intention at that point to kill? Well, members of the jury, you can think to yourself what profit would it be to him to kill?”

Nash conceded that his client behaved “extremely selfishly”, but “what he was trying to do was to buy himself time, in effect to get away”.

Josh White is a London-based freelance journalist.