A MAN charged with a shotgun murder on a housing estate denied the killing yesterday.

Keith McQuade, 46, said that he had no reason to kill Lee King, 32.

The prosecution allege that he was angered that Mr King had insulted his former lover by calling her a slut.

But Mr McQuade said that he was not hurt by remarks about Lisa Piercey, 25, a mother-of-three.

He said that Mr King told him two nights before he was killed on the Park End estate, Middlesbrough, that he had slept with her.

Mr McQuade told Teesside Crown Court: "He just asked me in the pub 'You are not bothered about it are you, because I was round there that night?

"He said that she was an easy thing. 'She's a slut anyway, Isn't she?' I said 'She's got three kids to three different fellas, it's got nothing to do with me."

Mr McQuade said that Mr King had asked him to take part in an armed robbery of a crack house in Kensington Road, Middlesbrough, which was planned for the night he was killed.

He said that he was at his lodgings in Kenilworth Avenue, Park End, when Mr King arrived to collect some tools he had hidden in undergrowth in the back garden.

He said Mr King produced a sawn-off shotgun wrapped in binliners, at which point Mr McQuade said he wanted nothing to do with the robbery.

They left the house together, heading in opposite directions, and the next day he heard that Mr King had been shot dead.

James Spencer, prosecuting, asked him why he thought that witnesses had given evidence against him.

Mr McQuade said he believed that prosecution witnesses were involved in drugs and had plotted with each other to tell lies.

He denies murdering Mr King, from the estate's Stonor Walk, on January 28 last year.

The trial continues.