A controlling husband who stabbed his wife 29 times in their home and asked "have you not died yet?" was jailed for 19 years on Friday.
Zef Gjoni, 28, also tried to smother Denisa Fuli with a duvet but miraculously she survived the brutal attack.
A court heard Gjoni, an Albanian national, caused his wife 17 life-threatening injuries, including a collapsed lung and bleeding around her heart, but then claimed she had knifed him due to the stresses of lockdown.
However, the defendant was jailed for 19 years on Friday at Croydon Crown Court after a jury found him guilty of attempted murder.
Judge Daniel Flahive said Gjoni showed "a degree of planning" before the attack, My London reports.
Sentencing the thug, the judge added: "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.
"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."
Ms Fuli, a Romanian national, was attacked in the early hours of April 1, 2020, in the second week of the first national lockdown, in the family home in Thornton Heath, south London.
Alexander Abgamu, prosecuting, said the stabbings happened after Gjoni locked the door and when his spouse tried to get some fresh air, pushed her away from it and forbid her to leave the house or call anyone.
Gjoni then told his wife, who has a young daughter in Romania, "that tonight she will die – and he will go to prison, or he will die – and she will go to prison", and she asked him if he had gone crazy.
Mr Abgamu said later that night, after the couple had gone to bed, Ms Fuli woke up to find Gjoni had tied her up with his belt and told her he wanted to beat her up, before "repeating the warning that one of them would die that night".
The court then heard how at around 4am on April 1, after releasing Ms Fuli from his belt, Gjoni forced his wife to open the door of the bathroom where she was trying to hide from him, telling her she had "no more chances to live".
The prosecution described how Gjoni repeatedly stabbed Ms Fuli with two knives from the kitchen, holding one in each of his hands, before smothering her with a duvet and pulling it back to ask: "Have you not died yet?" Mr Abgamu described how when Gjoni was finished he tried to make Ms Fuli hold the knives but she "no longer had the strength to hold them", and she pleaded with her husband to call an ambulance.
The court heard how when Gjoni called 999, he told the operator "that they had had a fight and that she had stabbed herself to the heart two to three times". Although Gjoni stuck with his story in his police statement, during his trial a medical expert told jurors Ms Fuli could not have inflicted the stab wounds - which included several to her back - on her own body.
Mr Yogain Chandarana, defending, argued they had not had the ability to test Ms Fuli’s evidence regarding the incidents leading up to the stabbing, including being tied up, as she had refused to appear in court for part of the trial due to it being "too much".
"This court did not have the opportunity to assess her account in full," explained Mr Chandarana, who urged Judge Daniel Flahive, sentencing, to be "cautious" in approaching the account, and to leave the details the defence was unable to challenge out of his sentencing. Mr Chandarana described Gjoni as "a man of previous good character, a hardworking individual, [with] not even the slightest hint of this type of issue before".
He added there was "not even any evidence of any arguments or issues between the two of them before this" and urged Judge Flahive to consider how the pressure of lockdown, and inability for the couple to travel to their respective home countries, could not excuse but might help explain Gjoni's outburst of domestic violence.
