Jealous murderer’s self-defence case rejected in one hour

A man who pleaded self-defence after stabbing his ex-girlfriend’s new partner to death has been found guilty of murder after just one hour of jury deliberation.

Prince Fahnbulleh, 27, flew into a jealous rage after finding his ex, Janika Bevin, in bed with another man in her western Sydney apartment in June 2023.

He had gone there to retrieve belongings from his on-again, off-again partner, but on arrival ignored the pile of clothes she left for him outside.

Fahnbulleh jumped a fence, scaled a set of stairs and entered Bevin’s unit uninvited, a jury was told.

Upon seeing the sleeping couple, he attacked 25-year-old Yohana Angok, fatally stabbing him in the heart.

Fahnbulleh then fled through an upstairs window and into a car driven by his bewildered friend Adrian Shillingsworth.

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“I saw him covered in blood,” Shillingsworth testified during the trial.

“He just told me to drive.”

After Shillingsworth dropped Fahnbulleh at his home, his car’s passenger seat, dashboard and roof lining were all stained with blood, he told the jury.

Fahnbulleh faced a 10-day trial in the NSW Supreme Court after pleading not guilty to murdering Angok.

But it took the jury only an hour to find him guilty on June 4.

During those proceedings, crown prosecutor Mark Hay relayed threats Fahnbulleh aimed at Angok days before his murder.

They included texting Angok “I’ll find you soon or later” and sending him a picture of a handgun.

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“I’m not going to stop till you get shot in your head think I’m playing,” Fahnbulleh wrote in another message to his soon-to-be victim.

But Fahnbulleh’s barrister Scott Fraser SC argued the victim had a cheese knife that he used to attack Fahnbulleh, evidenced by a small cut on his right hand.

“If there is the prospect that the deceased himself had a knife at the time he came together with the accused, then that raises at a bare minimum the issue of self-defence,” he told the jury.

The Crown rejected this argument as fanciful.

“(Angok) was not laying in bed ... with a knife ready to go,” Hay said.

The jury agreed the evidence proved beyond a doubt that Fahnbulleh had murdered his ex-partner’s new lover.

He will be sentenced at a later date.

AAP