‘She used a crowbar to break into my dad’s home’

A fashion designer accused of murdering a French nanny tried to break into her lover’s father’s home with a crowbar and threatened him with a knife, a court heard.

Sabrina Kouider, 35, and Ouissem Medouni, 40, tortured, beat and murdered 21-year-old Sophie Lionnet at their £900,000 Wimbledon home on 18 September last year, it is alleged.

The couple held Ms Lionnet’s head underwater in the bath until she confessed to sleeping with Kouider’s ex boyfriend Mark Walton, who founded Boyzone while at school with Shane Lynch, the Old Bailey has heard.

Kouider and Medouni blame each other for the murder, each claiming to have been sleeping while the other killed the nanny in the bath.

But they both admit perverting the course of justice by burning Ms Lionnet’s body.

Medouni today (thurs) told the court Kouider had cut off the electricity to his father’s house and attacked his door with a crowbar in 2015.

He said: ‘I was in the bedroom, the door was closed and what happened is she came in the middle of the night and broke the door she took a kind of a crowbar to open the door.

‘I didn’t want to see her that day. She cut off the electricity of the whole house, it was 6am and she tried to open the doors and the window, she was crazy, crazy.’

Kouider’s defence barrister Icah Peart QC suggested Medouni’s father had assaulted Kouider.

Medouni said: ‘That’s not true, he was protecting me from her because she wanted to get into the house’.

Mr Peart said Kouider then fled France to the UK and Medouni then called her from France telling her not to make a complaint against his father or she would never see him again.

Medouni said: ‘That’s not true at all’ and scoffed at the implication.

The court has heard Kouider had threatened Medouni’s father with a knife while they were living together in Vigenux Sur Seine in 2002 or 2003.

‘I later asked Sabrina but she denied it,’ Medouni said.

Kouider had also set light to the curtains of their Queensway flat in 2006 when Medouni returned home late from working as a financial analyst at Société Générale, according to his defence statement.

Medouni said their relationship was ‘on-and-off’, and though they would often break up they would always end up back together.

Asked if he had a big argument with Kouider in the weeks leading up to Ms Lionnet’s death, and he said: ‘We always had arguments’.

Mr Peart accused him of taking Kouider’s phone in order to use an online dating app, and Medouni responded: ‘What? That’s not true. I would’ve been very stupid to do that because – using her phone to go to a dating app? I’m not that stupid.’

‘You were completely confident in your hold over Sabrina weren’t you?’ asked Mr Peart.

Medouni said: ‘I know how paranoid she is and I would use her phone to go to a dating app and chat with girls? I’m not that crazy.’

The couple moved into Wimbledon Park Road in 2013, with Walton paying thousands of pounds for his ex’s rent.

Ms Lionnet was forced to live and sleep at a desk in the couple’s flat, and forbidden to leave the house until she ‘admitted’ conspiring with the Pop Idol judge, the court has heard.

The nanny, from Troyes, north east France, had moved to the UK in 2016 to improve her English.

Medouni and Kouider, both of (164) Wimbledon Park Road, Southfields, southwest London, each deny murder, but admit perverting the course of justice by burning the body.

The trial continues.