An illegal alien who passed through Turkey, Greece, Germany, and France before reaching England in the back of a lorry has been convicted of murdering and dismembering Lorraine Cox in Exeter, Devon.
24-year-old Azam Mangori, an Iraqi Kurd who gave his name as ‘Christopher Mayer’ on arrival in Britain, was found to have murdered 32-year-old Lorraine Cox in his flat above a kebab shop and kept her body there for a week before chopping her into seven pieces which he buried in the woods.
Prosecutors described the dismemberment as “a neat and professional amputation of her limbs” and noted that Mangori had been researching the subject online days prior to the killing.
The migrant, who took the SIM card from his victims’s phone and hacked her Facebook account in order to impersonate her, had admitted preventing a lawful burial but denied murder, claiming Ms Cox had died after inhaling a narcotic substance from silver foil, which she brought to his flat herself, following consensual sex.
Jurors found these and other claims by Mangori — for example, that he did not go to the authorities because he thought dead people could on occasion return to life of their own accord after some hours — to be not credible, not least because a toxicologist found no drugs in Ms Cox’s system.
“Azam Mangori killed Lorraine Cox then callously disposed of her body, faking messages to maintain the lie that she was still alive and giving false hope to her family and friends,” commented senior prosecutor Helen Phillips for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
“He continued his lies throughout the investigation and trial, and still refuses to reveal the location of her remains. Our thoughts are with Lorraine’s family and friends at this difficult time,” she added.
In a statement, Ms Cox’s family said they “hope and pray that no other woman or family has to go through what our beautiful girl suffered, or that any other family suffers the brutal, distressing experience we have all been through.”
During the trial, it wassuggested by commentators including Brexit leader Nigel Farage that Lorraine Cox’s murder was receiving fairly minimal coverage from mainstream media such as the BBC compared to other high-profile killings. He also noted that the case did not appear to be rousing feminist protesters.
Farage speculated that this was because Mangori is a failed asylum seeker, previously detained by the authorities in Birmingham but not held and deported, leaving him free to work in the illegal tobacco trade in Exeter and, ultimately, become a killer.
The migrant will be sentenced for his crimes in the coming weeks.