A Portuguese factory worker described today how he slit his pregnant girlfriend's throat after she told him she had cheated on him.

Hugo Quintas, 25, said he "lost it" when Hayley Richards, from Trowbridge, Wiltshire, smiled as she confessed to him that she had slept with another man three weeks earlier.

He told the jury how she had desperately tried to fight him off after he cut her throat with a craft knife and stood up clutching her neck with her hands as she staggered around her flat, covered in blood.

Giving evidence for a second day at Bristol Crown Court, Quintas told the jury that his 23-year-old girlfriend "got very upset" after he told her he was planning to go to Portugal later that day on June 11.

"I didn't really know what she was going to say," he told the court. "She said 'I'm sorry, I slept with another man three weeks ago'. So I stood up from the sofa and said 'what do you mean?'. "Then she said 'I'm sorry, I've slept with another man'.

So then I was very upset. I only wanted to hurt her because she was smiling and I knew that face. I know Hayley. When she has that face she used to provoke me. "Then I lost it when I saw her smiling. I only wanted to hurt her. I went to the kitchen and I pulled out a drawer and grabbed hold of a knife. Then I went after her and said 'you whore, you prostitute'.

"Then I realised she was had opened the door and she was going to run away in the corridor. Then I held her mouth and cut her throat."

Her throat had been cut from ear-to-ear by Quintas, who strangled her just six days earlier during another row. He has pleaded not guilty to murdering his girlfriend in the early hours of June 11, but has admitted her manslaughter on the grounds of provocation.

  • Full coverage of the trial in Friday's Wiltshire Times