“I would kill you anyway,” a man reportedly told a woman after beating her with praying rosary beads, a jury has heard.
Binyam Solomon, 28, is on trial at Oxford Crown Court charged with five counts; three of assault by beating, one on intentional strangulation, and one of assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
The offences allegedly took place across July and August last year at an address in Oxford against a woman we have decided not to name.
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Solomon is accused of hitting the woman with rosary beads after she refused to ‘pray away the demons’.
He is also accused of strangling her and refusing to leave her home.
During the trial on Monday (September 9), the woman gave evidence from the witness stand behind a curtain.
She said: “I came back to the house and he said that we have demons. He went into my room and…he came upstairs and was carrying a big wooden rosary, a praying rosary.
“When he prays to the demons, he hits himself with the rosary. He was doing that and he came into the room and said, ‘We need to pray’ and I said no and he hit me with the rosary very hard.
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“He hit me on the side of my body. I was really shocked and I cried, it was really painful. I said, ‘It hurts’ and he said ‘The demons hurt all the time’.
“It hurt a lot so I looked in the mirror and I saw a very big mark.”
The woman said she had called the police but Solomon had reportedly ‘snatched’’ the phone from her hand.
“He didn’t let me use the phone,” she continued. “He called me a b**** and said, ‘If I want to kill you I would kill you anyway’ and then he pushed me onto the stairs and I fell onto my back.”
On another occasion, the woman alleges she came home and Solomon had put his hands around her neck.
“He said, ‘Where have you been?’ and I said work. He said, ‘That’s a lie, I can smell sperm on you.’ I was really upset so I said, ‘Okay I will go back to work then’.
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“He grabbed me and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere’. He just grabbed me around my neck. He pulled my head back.
“He had a lot of bracelets and rings so he just scratched me on my forehead….I could see the blood coming.”
Solomon, of Normandy Crescent, Oxford, denies the offences. The trial continues this week.
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