Roshan Dantis, 30, was convicted at the High Court in Glasgow yesterday of the “barbaric” killing of 23-year-old Khusbu Shah and sentenced to a minimum of 24 years in prison.

The judge, Lord Pentland, described him as a “vicious and cold-blooded murderer” who had acted with “chilling composure”.

On June 1 last year Dantis restrained and strangled the young Nepalese mother of a four-year-old son in her home in Dennistoun and then severed her head and hands with a meat cleaver. Inspired by the Kathy Reichs forensic thriller Devil Bones, he then drained her body of blood in the bath before disposing of it in a holdall.

He used her mobile phone to text Nagendra Shah, her husband and his classmate at the University of Strathclyde, where they were both studying for a Masters in business and technology.

The text read: “We have ur wife. Don’t call police. We are watchin u. If anyone is told we will kill her and u.”

Dantis sent a series of texts demanding that Mr Shah take £120,000 to London to pay the kidnappers and prevent his wife being killed. In order to prove his compliance he was also told to sell his television to his “fat classmate” Mr Dantis.

In the six weeks before he killed Mrs Shah, Dantis made lists detailing what he needed to buy – including a Chinese meat cleaver. Lord Pentland told him: “Khusbu Shah was a vibrant and loving young wife and mother whose husband was one of your closest friends.

“The jury has heard that you strangled her, then cut off her head and hands. The exact motive for this appalling crime may never be known, but it may well have been a scheme to extort money from Mr Shah.”

The judge said the murder had had a devastating effect on Mrs Shah’s child and other members of her family.

Dantis, who is Indian, was sentenced to 10 years for each of two other crimes, attempting to pervert the course of justice and attempting to extort £120,000. They will run concurrent to the murder sentence. At the end of his sentence he will face a deportation order.

The jury took less than two hours to return unanimous guilty verdicts on all three charges.

Dantis moved to the UK with his wife Astrid in September 2008 to further his studies.

The engineering graduate enrolled on a business and technology course where he met Mr Shah. He had previously worked in the banking industry in his home country and in Dubai.

The trial heard that Dantis took a taxi to the Shahs’ home in Coventry Drive, Dennistoun, on the morning of June 1, giving the driver the false name Abdul.

He is then thought to have launched his assault, strangling Mrs Shah before cutting off her head and hands.

Dantis put his victim’s body in a blue holdall that he had bought from Argos and which was later found dumped in bushes behind the Shahs’ flat.

Plastic bags containing Mrs Shah’s head and hands, the cleaver, a towel, disposable gloves and a blood-stained hooded top were concealed in a railway embankment at a footpath between Whitevale Street and Bathgate Street.

Prosecutors described the killer as a “monster of utter brutality” who made up lies to try to combat the “overwhelming” evidence against him.

Lesley Thomson, area procurator fiscal for Glasgow and Strathkelvin, said: “This attack has brought untold suffering to those who knew and loved Khusbu.

“Dantis planned his evil crime in calculated detail and, in a callous betrayal of his friendship with the Shah family, pretended to Mrs Shah’s husband that his wife was probably safe in an attempt to extort money from him.”