A stalker who threatened to ‘carve’ his victim walked from court – after a judge was told he’d be flying out to Hong Kong on Saturday.

Sahil Bhavnani, 22, who made terrifying threats to a fellow student at Oxford Brookes, was due to be sentenced last month.

But when a judge at Oxford Crown Court heard it could be six weeks before the university decided on whether the engineering student would be thrown off his course, he adjourned the case to January.

On Thursday, defence barrister Richard Davies told the court that a decision had been made more swiftly.

He said: “Unfortunately for Mr Bhavnani it’s to expel him from the university and the degree he was on.”

The stalker was planning to return to Hong Kong with his father on December 11, Mr Davies said.

Judge Nigel Daly sentenced him to four months’ imprisonment suspended for two years and imposed a five year restraining order.

“If you breach that [restraining] order there is a maximum of five years’ imprisonment to serve,” he told Bhavnani.

“I hope that your obsession with her is over.”

Last month, the court heard that Bhavnani made terrifying threats in a 100 page letter delivered to his nursing student victim’s door in March.

He acknowledged she might ‘try to leave him’. “My plan B is already in existence,” he warned. His plan consisted of carving her face and ‘kissing away’ her tears, chaining her hands behind her back, feeding her every day and giving her ‘plenty of water’.

In another extract from the rambling letter, read by prosecutor Cathy Olliver in November, Bhavnani crowed: “I’m being quite literal when I say I’ll take your heart as you have stolen mine.”

He claimed he’d copied the threats from poetry he’d found online.

His victim said in an impact statement she was terrified in case the stalker would sexually assault her.

The letter was the culmination of several months of worrying behaviour, starting in 2020.

He left flowers, a bottle of Sambuca and card outside her student house in February.

On Valentine’s Day he was back with a bunch of flowers and other gifts, begging on the doorstep: “Please, I love you, she needs to hear it.”

Interviewed by the police in the spring, he gave a prepared statement acknowledging he’d been ‘very foolish’ and made a ‘massive error of judgement’.

Bhavnani, of James Wolfe Road, Oxford, pleaded guilty to stalking but not guilty to a more serious form of the offence. The maximum sentence for the lesser stalking offence is six months' imprisonment. Bhavnani has already spent a month on remand after breaching his bail in the autumn.

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