A British court has sentenced to life an Indian PhD student for bludgeoning his estranged wife to death with a baseball bat in a "prolonged and ferocious" attack.
34-year-old Anurag Johri was told by a court in Birmingham he would serve a minimum of 13 years for murdering his wife Deepti, "a young woman with her life to look forward to", before being deported to India.
Johri had enrolled himself for a PhD in Business Process Outsourcing at the University of Central England in Birmingham.
The sentence came after a jury took just over two hours on Friday to find Johri guilty of murdering 29-year-old Deepti, whose body was discovered at the university in November 2005.
The day before the carefully planned attack, Johri made an Internet search for tips on killing, including looking up how to murder someone and not get caught, the Crown Court was told.
Judge Justice Gray, delivering the judgment at the court, about 190 km from London, told him: "Your attack on her using a baseball bat as a weapon was prolonged and ferocious. You struck her on at least four occasions, fracturing her skull in three different places."
A CCTV tape played to the jury "demonstrated vividly how terrifying an ordeal it was for her," the judge said.
"I have no doubt that the attack was carefully planned and premeditated," the judge.