A butcher’s insistence that he had consensual sex with a High Wycombe student who “vanished as if into thin air” after he picked her up in a drunken state is a “nonsense proposition”, a prosecutor has told a jury.

Richard Wright QC began his closing prosecution speech in the trial of Pawel Relowicz by reminding the jury at Sheffield Crown Court that it is two years to the day since 21-year-old Libby Squire disappeared in the early hours of February 1, 2019, in Hull.

He told the court: “Two years ago today, at probably this very moment, her friends and her family were frantically searching for her and for news of her as she had vanished as if into thin air.”

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Mr Wright told the jury the prosecution case is that Relowicz, 26, picked up Ms Squire just off Beverley Road, in Hull, before driving her to the nearby Oak Road playing fields where he raped her and put her into the River Hull.

Relowicz, who has admitted committing a series of sexually motivated offences in the 18 months before Ms Squire disappeared, has told the jury at Sheffield Crown Court he had consensual sex with the Hull University student on Oak Road before he left her alive.

Bucks Free Press: Libby SquireLibby Squire

On Monday, Mr Wright asked the jury to consider whether a young woman who had been crying, shivering uncontrollably and begging to go home to her mother would say: “I’ll lie here on this scrap of grass and I’ll have unprotected sex with you here and now.”

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The prosecutor said: “It is, we suggest in common sense, a nonsense proposition.”

He said: “From everything you know about Libby Squire’s condition – freezing cold, desperately upset, injured, wanting her mum, wanting what any child wants when they’re upset and wants comfort – that girl suddenly recovers and suggests having sexual intercourse on that grubby bit of ground next to his car?

“She was hypothermic, she was shivering uncontrollably, according to the defendant.”

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Mr Wright also asked the jury to remember that this was a man “whose whole purpose was to commit sexual offences that evening”.

He reminded the court how Ms Squire had gone out with friends on the night of January 31, 2019, but was refused entry to a club because she was drunk and returned to her street in a taxi.

Instead of going home, the jury has heard, the philosophy student went to Beverley Road where a number of people tried to help her in the freezing conditions before she got into Relowicz’s car.

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Mr Wright told the jury that the defendant had been out for three hours that night looking to “satisfy his insatiable sexual urges”.

He said that Relowicz has admitted he “wanted an opportunity for easy sex”.

Ms Squire’s body was found in the Humber Estuary about seven weeks after she went missing.

Polish-born father-of-two Relowicz, of Raglan Street, Hull, denies rape and murder.