Robbers attacked two French students in their home in London, bound and tortured them for their bank card PIN numbers, then stabbed them to death when an attempt to withdraw money failed, a prosecutor says.
Prosecution lawyer Crispin Aylett told a jury at the Central Criminal Court that Gabriel Ferez and Laurent Bonomo, both 23, suffered almost 250 stab wounds between them in a "relentless and merciless onslaught."
Londoners Dano Sonnex, 23, and Nigel Farmer, 34 have pleaded not guilty to their murders.
Aylett said Sonnex and Farmer broke into Bonomo's rented apartment on the morning of June 29 last year, overpowered and bound the two students, then tortured them into revealing their PIN numbers.
He said bank records showed £360 ($NZ948.61) had been withdrawn that day from a nearby machine using Bonomo's bank card, but an attempt to use Ferez' card had failed. Aylett said that "may have sealed the fate" of the students.
"To take revenge for the fact that they had been unable to steal money from Mr. Ferez, both men were murdered in a way that can only be described as inhuman," he said.
Ferez's parents Olivier and Francoise Villement, and Bonomo's girlfriend Marie Bertez and his father Guy, were all in court to hear the details of how the students were brutalized and saw photographs of their injuries.
Justice John Saunders apologized to jurors for showing them "the most distressing photographs that you will ever see."
Bertez, who had planned to return to London on June 30, a day after the murders, walked out in tears after hearing that her stockings had been found tied around Ferez's wrists.
Aylett said the killers set the apartment ablaze to cover their tracks.
"What the firemen found was a scene of almost unimaginable horror," said Aylett.
Aylett said the victims were both graduate students at London's prestigious Imperial College with "brilliant futures ahead of them".
"Neither of them had an enemy in the world," he said.
The murder trial is being closely followed in France, in part because large numbers of young French men and women live in the UK for work or study.
While there are no hard figures, the French Embassy here estimates that there could be 200,000 or even 300,000 French citizens living in the London area.
Farmer has pleaded not guilty to all charges, despite turning himself in to police several days after the murders, saying "I just killed two people."
Sonnex has admitted stealing a bank card, credit card, two Sony PSP games consoles and two mobile phones from the apartment on the day of the crime, but denies charges of murder, false imprisonment and arson.
