Bank of America worker charged with murders in Hong Kong

HONG KONG, Nov. 3 (UPI) -- British banker Rurik Jutting, an employee of Bank of America, was charged on Monday for the murders of two women, believed to be prostitutes, in Hong Kong.

Jutting appeared before Hong Kong's Eastern Magistrates Court on Monday, responding with "I do" when asked if he understood the charges. He did not enter a plea.

The 29-year-old was arrested Saturday after police discovered the bodies of two women in his bloodied high-rise apartment in the Wan Chai district.

The body of one woman, believed to be between 25 and 30, was found in the living room with a slashed throat and stab wounds to the neck and buttocks. Local media reported she was a disc jockey but her identity has not been released. She was killed on Nov. 1.

A second woman, 25-year-old Sumarti Ningsih of Indonesia, was nearly decapitated and stuffed into a suitcase on the balcony. She was killed on Oct. 27, and was partially decomposed. According to the South China Morning Post, she arrived in Hong Kong last month on a tourist visa.

Jutting's lawyer on Monday asked the judge to transfer the suspect from police custody to jail. Martyn Richmond also informed the judge that his client had been prohibited from calling the British consulate in Hong Kong for the first 36 hours of his detention and that his client had not been allowed to choose his own attorney but was instead given a list of lawyers to choose from.

An investigation into the murders is underway.

According to Bloomberg, an automated response from a Bank of America email account of one Rurik Jutting, possibly identifiable with the murder suspect, was out of the office "indefinitely" and suggested contacting someone who's not "an insane psychopath."