The jury in the trial of a former public school hockey coach accused of the murder of his wife have been discharged.
The panel of seven men and four women told Mr Justice Choudhury they were deadlocked after spending nine hours and 46 minutes deliberating over the fate of Mohamed Samak.
The 42-year-old former Malvern College coach was accused of accused of killing his interior designer wife Joanne after the couple ‘drifted apart’ and he struggled to find work.
Samak, a former Egyptian hockey international who was a member of the England over-40s squad, claimed his wife stabbed herself in the stomach and chest after struggling with her mental health and alcohol.
But prosecutors said he killed his wife because he was suffering financial problems and had become interested in another woman.
They argued that he had been seeking to characterise his wife as ‘an out-of-control alcoholic in order to bolster his account that Joanne took her own life’.
Prosecution KC Harpreet Sandhu told the defendant during cross-examination last week: ‘The reality is that Jo didn’t have an alcohol problem, she drank socially…but she wasn’t a problem drinker.’
He said the pathological evidence showed 49-year-old Mrs Samak’s liver was ‘basically normal and didn’t have any signs of long-term alcohol abuse’.
The barrister said Samak’s account was part of a ‘character assassination’ of her to support his account of how she died at their Droitwich, Worcestershire, home last July.
The defendant denied this and told the court he was not saying Mrs Samak was an ‘alcoholic’, but he added: ‘When you see bottles on the side and bottles in the fridge… you worry about your wife.’
Samak admitted he had deleted messages from a woman he had ‘reconnected’ with – and ended up kissing in London – just over a fortnight before his wife died.
The court heard Samak had sent the woman, Fadila Fadou, an email saying ‘I love you’ in the build-up to their London sightseeing trip.
Jurors at Worcester Crown Court began their deliberations on Thursday afternoon but had sent a series of notes to the judge on Friday suggesting they were struggling to reach a consensus.
But just 50 minutes after recommencing their deliberations today, the jury said they remained split on the case and the panel were discharged.
The Crown Prosecution Service now have seven days to decide on whether to seek a retrial. A further hearing will be held at Worcester Crown Court in a fortnight.
Mrs Samak’s friends and family, who had packed the public gallery for each day of the trial, sobbed and hugged one another in the court’s foyer after seeing the jury discharged.
Samak, wearing a suit and tie, wiped away tears as he was led away by the court’s dock officer.
He will remain in prison on remand.
The trial heard that the defendant and his wife slept in separate rooms – and that Samak waited an hour before calling 999.
Mrs Samak was found by emergency responders with a serrated blade protruding from her abdomen as she lay between the landing and her bedroom in the early hours of the morning, jurors heard.
Samak said he had ‘carried out CPR, but not proper CPR because I was panicking’. He added: ‘My hands were not in the right position (on her chest) because of the blood and cuts’.
But during his cross-examination Mr Sandhu accused the defendant of making that account up, pointing to a defence statement in which it was stated that Samak ‘did not at any time carry out CPR on the deceased’.
Mr Sandhu said that while an attending police officer who started CPR ended up with blood on his gloves which came from Mrs Samak’s chest, Samak had no blood visible on him.
Samak, who was qualified in CPR through his job and other work as a lifeguard, replied: ‘I was avoiding touching the cut.’
He told the jury: ‘I lied too many times…but I’m not a murderer. I’m not a killer. What would make me do that?’
The couple met in 2011 while Mrs Samak, an interior designer, was on holiday in Egypt and he was working at the Hilton hotel where she stayed.
They married in 2014 and Samak then landed a job coaching hockey at prestigious Malvern College, which lasted 18 months. The trial has heard Samak had also worked with the under-18 Welsh national team.
Mrs Samak was made redundant in March last year but went on to set up a new interior design company with eight of her former colleagues, called Chapter 9 Design, the court heard, and she had also been busy organising her forthcoming 50th birthday party.
Samak denied murder.