Saudi prince ‘battered servant to death’, court told

Grandson of Saudi king denies prosecution claims that he was having a sexual relationship with victim Bandar Abulaziz

A Saudi prince strangled and battered his servant to death in a ferocious sexually motivated murder, a court heard today.

Saud bin Abdulaziz bin Nasir al Saud, a grandson of the billionaire king of Saudi Arabia, is accused of killing his male aide in a brutal attack in a luxury London hotel room earlier this year.

The bloodied body of the 32-year-old servant, Bandar Abdulaziz, referred to in court simply as Bandar, was found in a suite at the five-star Landmark Hotel on 15 February after his master raised the alarm, claiming Bandar was suffering the effects of an earlier street robbery.

But police soon realised all was not quite as it seemed, the Old Bailey heard. A post-mortem report revealed the dead man had bite marks to his face, his lips were split open and there was evidence of manual compression on his neck. Though there was no evidence of a recent sexual assault, semen – possibly belonging to the prince – was detected on the victim’s underpants.

Officers then discovered CCTV footage showing the 34-year-old prince physically assaulting Bandar in the Landmark lift twice in the weeks leading up to the murder. The film, shown to the jury today, showed stocky Saud baring his teeth as he repeatedly punched his slimmer victim in the head.

Another camera apparently caught Saud “kicking out” at his victim outside a restaurant in the exclusive district of Knightsbridge, just hours before the murder. After this skirmish, the two men then headed back to the hotel, where they drank a bottle of champagne and knocked back six shots of Sex On The Beach cocktail, the jury was told. By the next morning, Bandar was dead.

The court heard that the victim, an orphan who had been adopted by a middle class family, had met Saud through friends and spent his last three years travelling with the prince as an “occasional companion”. The two men arrived in London on 20 January after visiting Milan, Budapest, Prague, Marrakesh and the Maldives.

On arrival in London, they were collected from Heathrow airport by a chauffeur working for the Saudi embassy and taken to the Landmark Hotel.

Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, for the prosecution, said the men would spend their time shopping, eating out and at bars and nightclubs, often staying up late and sleeping in, and not leaving the hotel until early the next afternoon.

Jurors were told the defendant was a member of the Saudi royal family who had studied political science at university. “His father is a nephew of the king and his mother is a daughter of the king,” said Laidlaw. “He has the title of prince,” the barrister added.

After his arrest, the prince told police in a statement that Bandar was his friend and not his servant – or indeed his lover. He denies he is gay, and claims to have a girlfriend back in Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is a capital offence under Sharia law.

But the prosecution say there is ample evidence to prove he is lying about both the nature of his relationship with Bandar and his sexuality in an attempt to cover up the murder.

Prosecutor Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, told the jury that while a defendant’s sexuality would normally be of “absolutely no relevance to a criminal trial”, it was crucial in this case because there was a “sexual element to his mistreatment of Bandar.”

“The defendant’s keeping back of his homosexuality might in other circumstances, because of the cultural background perhaps, be explained away by embarrassment, or, indeed, fear,” said Laidlaw. “But the defendant’s concealing of the sexual aspect to the abuse to his victim was for altogether more sinister reasons, and it does tend to suggest that there was a sexual element to the circumstances of what it is that actually happened in room 312 before Bandar died.”

As this evidence was read out, the prince’s father listened impassively in the public gallery.

The jury later heard that two male escorts have come forward to tell police that the prince paid them for sexual acts during his stay in London, and that a copy of the 2009 Spartacus International Gay Guide was round in his hotel room. “Compromising” photographs of Bandar, partially naked, were discovered on his mobile phone, and computer records showed that he had been browsing “gay massage or spa websites and male escort sites”.

A porter at the Landmark hotel formed the impression that Saud was the prince’s servant but also that they were involved in a “relationship of sorts and were gay”, the jury was told.

Another said the victim was “quiet, he did not talk much and he was instructed what to do”, the court heard.

“Contrary to his claims of equal treatment, the defendant travelled in business class whiles Bandar flew in economy,” said Laidlaw.

The manager of a restaurant where the men dined January thought “from their behaviour and the way they spoke that they were gay”.

Laidlaw said the prince “flirted” with a gay barman at a hotel where he was drinking on another occasion and “suggested that they go out socially together”.

There was one double bed in the bedroom shared by the prince and his aide and there were occasions when the two men might have shared it but others when the servant apparently slept on the floor behind the sofa, the court heard.

The jurors were told that after initially denying the killing, the prince changed his story. At first, he insisted that Bandar had been attacked and robbed of €3,000 on the Edgware Road in central London three weeks before the murder, and had died of these lingering injuries.

Now, said Laidlaw, the prince admits carrying out the killing so it would be for them to decide if he were guilty of murder or only manslaughter.

The 34-year-old denies murder and one count of grievous bodily harm with intent. The trial continues.

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The Guardian