Jurors deliberating in the trial of a 26-year-old butcher accused of the rape and murder of a university student from High Wycombe have been told they can reach majority verdicts.

Libby Squire’s body was found in the Humber Estuary almost seven weeks after she went missing on February 1, 2019, following a night out in Hull.

Prosecutors have told Sheffield Crown Court that Ms Squire was raped and murdered by married father-of-two Pawel Relowicz after he met the “drunk” and “distressed” 21-year-old on Hull’s Beverley Road and drove her to the nearby Oak Road playing fields.

The judge, Mrs Justice Lambert, sent the jury out for its sixth day of deliberations on Thursday morning, telling them she would now accept majority verdicts of 11-1 or 10-2.

But she urged them to continue to try to reach unanimous decisions.

The prosecution’s case is that Relowicz dumped Ms Squire in the River Hull, which runs close by the playing fields. They said they cannot be certain whether she was dead or alive before she was thrown into the river.

During the four-week trial, the jury heard how the University of Hull philosophy student had been out with friends but was so drunk that she was refused entry to a nightclub.

Her friends paid a taxi driver to take her home but, instead of going into her shared student house, Ms Squire wandered in a drunken state – falling over in the snow and refusing offers of help from passers-by – until she encountered Relowicz, the court heard.

Relowicz told the jury that he did not kill Ms Squire and said he had consensual sex with her on Oak Road.

The defendant has admitted a series of what his barrister called “utterly disgusting” sexual offences in the months before that night, and admitted he watched porn and masturbated in the street in the hours after he said he had sex with the student.

Oliver Saxby QC, defending, said there was no evidence that Relowicz had killed her.

Giving evidence through an interpreter, Polish-born Relowicz told the court that he was driving around Hull on the evening of Ms Squire’s disappearance because he was “looking for a woman to have easy sex”.

The defendant – who has convictions for outraging public decency, voyeurism and sexually motivated burglaries – said he had parked his car near Oak Road with the intention of looking through windows and masturbating.

He told the court that he left Ms Squire on Oak Road, alive, to walk home.

A pathologist told the court he could not determine the cause of Ms Squire’s death due to the amount of time she had been in the water.

Relowicz, of Raglan Street, Hull, denies murder and rape.