Wavertree murder: Man strangled partner and left body next to baby

Mohammed Diakite will be sentenced on 21 March

A man who strangled and suffocated his girlfriend and then left her dead beside their sleeping baby has been convicted of her murder.

Mohammed Diakite, 20, killed N'Taya Cleverley-Elliott, 20, in a "merciless and sustained attack" at their home in Liverpool, on 29 January last year.

He denied strangling her but was found guilty of her murder after a trial at Liverpool Crown Court.

Diakite will be sentenced at the same court on 21 March.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said Diakite, who was also known as Nigel, started to make frantic phone calls to friends and called a support worker who was helping him with his immigration application to Britain at about 01:25 GMT on 29 January.

The support worker said he was talking about "the girl" and claimed he could not cope with the stress she was causing him.

The CPS said Diakite told the support worker Ms Cleverley-Elliott had been drinking and had beaten him, but toxicology tests carried out later did not support his claim.

He also told the woman he was going to jail because Ms Cleverley-Elliott was leaving him.

The support worker went to the flat in Prince Alfred Road in Wavertree, where she found the body of Ms Cleverley-Elliott under a duvet on a bed and their four-month-old baby in a cot beside her.

N'Taya Cleverley-Elliott met Diakite in Liverpool in 2019

Diakite had fled to Liverpool in a taxi but one of his friends took him to Merseyside Police's headquarters where he was detained and arrested.

He told his defence that he could not remember anything about that night.

Ms Cleverley-Elliott met Diakite in Liverpool in 2019 and the couple's baby was born in September 2020.

In the weeks leading up to her death, she was looking to leave the difficult relationship and find another to flat to live alone with her baby and was due to move into the apartment on the day of her death.

Senior Crown Prosecutor Angela Rowan, from CPS Mersey Cheshire, said: Ms Cleverley-Elliott was "the victim of a brutal, merciless and sustained attack".

"Mohammed Diakite is a manipulative and brutal liar who killed his girlfriend because he believed she was making plans to leave him," she said.

"She was trying to start afresh after months of his controlling and abusive behaviour."

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