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The barrister leading the trial of a man accused of murdering his former partner began cross examining him this afternoon.
Prosecutor Alison Morgan QC accused Ben Lacomba directly of murdering his former partner Sarah Wellgreen as she began her cross examination of the 39-year-old at Woolwich Crown Court this afternoon.
“Where’s Sarah?” began Ms Morgan.
“I don’t know” replied Lacomba, and the exchange continued, as Ms Morgan continued to question him.
“Where did you hide her body, Mr Lacomba?”
“I did not.”
“You did not what?”
“I had nothing to do with the disappearance of Sarah.”
“Did you bury her?”
“I did not.”
“Did you put her in water?”
“I did not.”
“Have a look at that map,” said Ms Morgan. “You help us now. Where is she?”
Ms Morgan acknowledged police sergeant Ryan Law, who has led the search team hunting for Sarah, and had been present in court.
“Police sergeant Law is in court,” she added. “His team are on standby 24-7. You just have to point on this picture as to where Sarah’s body is they’ll be there in minutes. Are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know where Sarah is,” replied Lacomba and he maintained that he knew nothing about his former partner’s disappearance from the home they shared in Bazes Shaw, New Ash Green, between October 9 and 10 last year.
Ms Morgan set about dissecting the evidence, and looked at Lacomba’s phone call to police on October 11, in which he had reported Sarah missing and mentioned various people in her life.
“This was a distraction,” she said. “What you hoped would come out of this was the police sending people to make inquiries of Neil James, Anthony Garnham and Nicola Doherty - for them to all become the focus of the investigation, to distract away from you.
To give you time to get your story straight and get rid of all these bits of evidence that might catch up with you. That’s what was happening.”
Lacomba replied: “No it was not.”
He said he was merely trying to give police as much information as he could think of about Sarah’s life - but Ms Morgan noted he didn’t mention to police the fact Sarah was trying to buy him out of the house, and had just got a new well-paid job, and that their relationship had soured.
At one point she referred to a statement from Sarah’s friend, in which Sarah recalled her first night back in Bazes Shaw when she moved back in May.
“Sarah told me she couldn’t stand being in or sleeping in the same bed,” Ms Doherty had said. “She found him fat and ugly.”
And Ms Morgan added: “That made you angry.”
Lacomba replied: “No I’m quite used to Sarah talking about me in that way.”
And she referred to a text to Neil James in which Sarah had called Lacomba “a fat ****”, adding: “Far from being a happy family you didn’t get on at all.”
Mr Lacomba insisted he was in bed all night on the night Sarah disappeared, and said he didn’t know why his own CCTV system was turned off at 12 minutes past midnight.
Ms Morgan asked him why his phones appeared to be active at key points in the night but he was unable to recall using his phones.
“We would know all about those phones and what they were doing in the early hours of the morning if we had them, but we don’t have them do we?” she said asking Lacomba to recall how he threw them in the river.
She said his reason for throwing them away was nothing to do with unsent messages he said he’d composed on them, but rather added: “You were worried what the telephones would tell police about where you had been overnight on October 9/10.”
Lacomba denied that was the case.
She also asked Lacomba about CCTV evidence of his car’s movements, and he queried which night she was referring to.
“I’m talking about the night of the 9th and 10th, when you were getting rid of Sarah’s body.”
“I did not get rid of Sarah’s body on the 9th and 10th, or any day,” replied Lacomba.
Asked to consider the CCTV allegedly showing his Vauxhall Zafira taxi driving down country lanes away from New Ash Green and returning two hours later, he said: “I don’t see how that’s my vehicle.
"It couldn’t have been me driving that car that night because I was asleep in my bedroom.”
Reflections of light captured from a window in Bazes Shaw on CCTV represented the moment he parked up shortly after the car returned, said Ms Morgan.
Read more from the trial:
“That was you driving back into the car park wasn’t it?” she said. “No it was not” he replied.
And he said a witness that saw him return to the house after that in the early hours of October 10 was mistaken about which night they had seen him - as he had left the house to investigate animal noises in the early hours of October 9, the previous night, and found the witness up when he returned.
Ms Morgan broke from the evidence at one point to ask again:
“Are you going to tell us where she is?”
Lacomba replied. “I don’t know where Sarah is.”
The trial continues.
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