Man stabs wife 29 times, then asks 'have you not died yet?'

A man who stabbed his wife 29 times at their house in Thornton Heath, south London at the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, has been sentenced to 19 years in jail.

Zef Gjoni, 28, not only stabbed his wife brutally with two knives at once, but also tried to smother her with a duvet and asked "have you not died yet?"

The incident took place at their home in London on April 1, 2020, when Gjoni's wife Denise Fuli opened the door to get some fresh air. However, he pushed her away and did not allow her to do so.

He then said: "Tonight she will die – and he will go to prison, or he will die – and she will go to prison." But Fuli did not know that her husband meant what he said. Later that night, she woke up to find that Gjoni had tied her up with a belt. He told her that he wanted to beat her up and added that "one of them would die that night."

The Croydon Crown Court heard that Gjoni, an Albanian national, caused his wife 17 life-threatening injuries, including a collapsed lung and bleeding around her heart. His wife miraculously survived the attack, per a report in The Mirror.

"You pose a significant risk of causing serious harm to others, especially those with whom you are in an intimate relationship, especially at times of stress," said the judge.

"Whatever triggered this was essentially not very much at all. You had essentially this explosion of violence, and there was, it seems to me, a degree of planning," he added.

He had initially claimed that his wife had stabbed herself during a fight between the two, but a medical expert told the jury that it could not have been possible since Fuli had several wounds on her back as well.

Gjoni has been sentenced to 19 years in prison and a further five years on extended licence. He had been found guilty of one count of attempted murder.