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The niece of a British Government minister has told a court she drunkenly plunged a knife into the naked body of a Frenchman she picked up in a bar, but had no idea why she did it.
Jessica Davies told her murder trial on Monday she had blacked out and had no recollection of the killing except "the sensation of the knife going in".
"I am horrified by what I have done," said the 30-year-old niece of Britain's multimillionaire junior defence minister Quentin Davies.

"I remember telling the police [who arrived at the scene] that I was a monster," she said. "I don't remember killing Olivier, but I take responsibility for killing him."
She said she no longer remembered making a statement the day of the November 2007 murder in her flat in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a chic Paris suburb, that said: "I just wanted to cut him a little but the knife went in by itself."
The blood-stained kitchen knife with a 15-centimetre blade that killed 24-year-old Olivier Mugnier was passed round for inspection by the three judges and the five women and four men of the jury at the court in Versailles.
Ms Davies, looking pale and drawn and dressed in jeans and a grey top, was giving evidence on the first day of her two-day trial at which the court heard of her dysfunctional family and her troubled adolescence.
Ms Davies, who was born in London to a British father and a French mother and grew up mostly in France, faces a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison if convicted of voluntary homicide without premeditation.
She said she had begun the weekend that Mr Mugnier died by sleeping with an ex-boyfriend on the Friday night.
She spent most of the Saturday drinking in a series of bars and cafes with friends before going alone to O'Sullivan's Irish pub near her home, where she met and began flirting with Mr Mugnier.
They had several drinks and when the bar closed decided to go to her place.
"I opened a bottle of wine. He rolled a joint ... We started undressing, making love," she told the court.
"He couldn't have a proper erection - but that was understandable given how much we'd drunk. We stopped making love. He took off the condom," Ms Davies said.
Then, she said, the next thing she knew she saw him lying bleeding from the neck on the bed, and she was trying to stem the blood with one hand and with the other was calling emergency services.
They arrived about 2.40am on the Sunday morning but within an hour Mr Mugnier had succumbed to the two knife wounds, one of which proved fatal after it went right through his body and touched his spine.
Ms Davies said the knife that killed Mr Mugnier was the one she had used to slash her own wrists and legs in her bathtub just a few months earlier when she was depressed after splitting up with her boyfriend.
Police told the court there was no sign of a struggle in the one-bedroom flat and neighbours had heard nothing.
They said Ms Davies was four times over the drink-drive alcohol limit and had traces of anti-depressants in her blood.
Earlier the court heard how Ms Davies developed behavioural problems after the acrimonious divorce of her parents when she was 14 and how she was badly affected by her maternal grandmother's repeated suicide attempts.
She started drinking heavily as a teenager and, by the time she was in university, she said: "I was drunk six days out of seven." She had also developed a cocaine habit, she added.
Her mother broke down in tears at one point as she detailed her daughter's difficult adolescent and university years.
A verdict is expected on Tuesday.
Her uncle hit the headlines in 2007 when he defected from Britain's opposition Conservatives to the ruling Labour Party, just before Gordon Brown was named the new Prime Minister.
He has since been appointed the Minister for Defence Equipment and Support.
source-smh.com.au/

Image by purplecthulhu via Flickr

LONDON, Dec. 19 (Xinhua) -- More than 2,000 people were trapped for hours inside the Channel Tunnel after four Eurostar trains broke down due to cold weather, according local news reports on Saturday.

The trains failed as they left the cold air in northern France and entered the warmer tunnel. The trains were coming from Brussels and Paris, and Eurostar said the change in the atmospheric conditions caused a problem with their electrics.

Eurostar said the four trains had been moved from the tunnel and passengers were being transferred to England.

"Four Eurostars broken down at one time -- it's absolutely unprecedented," said a spokesman from Eurotunnel, the operator of the Channel Tunnel.

"There's never actually been an evacuation of a Eurostar train in the 15 years that the tunnel has been opened and last night we evacuated two whole trains to get people off," he said.

Eurostar services have been cancelled until noon Saturday and will be severely disrupted at the weekend.

Heavy snowfall caused travel chaos, forced schools to close and cut off power supplies in parts of Britain on Friday. Meanwhile, more snow and freezing temperatures are expected for parts of Scotland and southeastern and eastern England.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-12/19/content_12672629.hm