A MAN used a sledgehammer to reign blows on his sleeping wife's head before slitting her throat with a kitchen knife, a court has heard.

George Kibuuka struck Margaret, his wife of 22 years, as she slept next to their young daughter, just yards away from their baby son in a cot.

The girl was one of three children Kibuuka had drugged with sleeping tablets so they wouldn't wake while he carried out the alleged murder, Winchester Crown Court heard.

Jurors were told how 48-year-old Kibuuka, a father of four children with Margaret, crushed sleeping tablets into bottles of Coke and Fanta as well as a trifle in the evening before he killed their mother at their home in Richville Road, Shirley.

Daily Echo: For a video of the top stories in today's Daily Echo, click the front page.

The children had spent the evening enjoying pizza as well as the trifle of soft drinks while watching a film in their parents' bedroom,, before going to bed late in the evening of Saturday, November 7, 2009.

The court heard how they woke the following morning to discover their mother dead in a blood-soaked bed and their father critically ill, having drank poison and stabbed himself, prosecutor Nigel Lickley told the court.

They wandered out into the street where one of the children called at a neighbour's house and told her "Somebody had killed his mummy", Mr Lickley said.

He added that the children thought both their parents had been killed by an intruder.

Police were called to the house just before 9am on Sunday November 8, where they found Margaret's body in one bedroom and Kibuuka wrapped in a blood stained sheet with a stab wound to his abdomen.

The court was told how in the background to the killing, Margaret, 40, was in the process of divorcing Kibukka because of his unreasonable behaviour.

Jurors heard how he had had affairs with two of Margaret's sisters and had even had two children with one of them.

Completing his opening speech to jurors, Mr Lickley said Kibuuka had admitted the killings to police and that he had "an intention to kill".

He added that Kibuuka had delivered a "severe and hard blow to her head and the deliberate cutting of her throat.

"There was no chance or prospect of survival."

Kibuuka, who the court heard was moved from prison to a secure mental health unit, denies one charge of murder and three charges of drugging his children.

Proceeding.