Officer's bodycam captures killer Atay's attempts to dupe police

Helena Karine Atay was cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of lack of intent after stabbing her husband Atakan, 45, with a knife.

The 42-year-old was previously given a local paper award after her campaign to raise half-a-million pounds, which Simon Cowell contributed up to £100,000 to, for her toddler daughter Sophie to get treatment in the US for neuroblastoma.

Helena Karine Atay and her husband, Atakan

Tragic Sophie lost her fight for life in 2010 when she was just two, before she could start the treatment in America but a family campaign for more research into the disease was taken to Downing Street.

Video footage, which was central to conviction, has now been released of Atay, who is known as Karine, moments after she stabbed her husband by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

Newcastle Crown Court heard, during Atay's five week trial, how she told police after the attack her husband had "enemies" and that she had been in bed when she heard a fight downstairs that night.

She later said she had been the victim of controlling and coercive behaviour by her husband.

The footage, captured on a police body camera, shows Atay talking to an officer while sitting on her bed.

After telling the police offer that she had heard shouting downstairs, she tells him that Atakan was "On the phone, about his nephew and stuff".

She said: "He was having an argument about his brother. But his brother lives in Ukraine, and he was talking about... he wanted him to loan money and he didn't want to loan it. But that's got nothing to do with here."

Atay then goes on to tell the officer: "But he has got enemies."

When she officer asks what she means by that, Atay responds: "Just... not enemies...and they wouldn't do that. Just, I don't know, business people.

"Business partners, partners that have gone."

When the officer asks "so there's been fall outs over business?", Atay replies "yeah that's it".

After Atakan has died, Atay is told that she is going to be arrested on suspicion of murder.

She responds to the officer by saying: "Oh really, he's not okay?"

While sitting on her bed in handcuffs, Atay tells the officer: "It should (sic) be nice to be you, you've no problems."

She then goes on to say: "Look, an argument that got out of control."

When the officer asks "Is that what happens?" she responds "I'm not going to tell you."

The court heard how Atay stabbed Atakan just below a tattoo which read "Sophie, my endless love".

Businessman Atakan was only able to utter the words "nine nine nine please" while struggling to breathe during a 17 minute call he made to the emergency services after the attack last October.

After Atakan fell silent, his wife, could be heard telling him: "You're lying. I would never do that to you Atakan. I would never hurt you."

Atay also said to her dying husband "there's Sophie", "we're going to get you an ambulance. I'm really sorry. I love you so much."

Atakan, who had business interests in a hotel and a convenience store named after the couple's late daughter, died after receiving two stab wounds, one of which punctured his heart, at their home in Birtley, Gateshead.

Atay said in a statement she had been strangled to the point where she feared she would pass out in an attack by her husband the year before.

She said on the night he was killed, Mr Atay and she had argued when she tried to leave the house for more drink, that he was "angry" and had kicked her in the leg and hurt her arm.

Atay claimed she was "terrified" her husband was "really going to hurt her".

She told jurors during the trial she stayed in the marriage as she feared her husband may take their children back to his homeland in Turkey and was worried how she would survive.

She told the court: "I was scared, scared of the children going, scared of how I would survive, I didn't know how I would survive."

Prosecutor John Elvidge QC claimed Atay "exaggerated" her husband's past behaviour and that then trouble had started that night because she wanted to go out and get alcohol.

Mr Elvidge said the accused mum could be "volatile, confrontational, aggressive and threatening" in drink and had been in trouble because of it in the past.

He said her alcohol problems date back to before the tragic death of the couple's young daughter.

Mr Elvidge told jurors: "The prosecution says that on the night of October 18 2018, as on previous occasions, her craving for alcohol led Karine Atay to seek to leave the matrimonial home.

"There was a confrontation but not a grave one until she chose to pick up a knife and use it against her unarmed husband, deliberately and unlawfully stabbing him more than once, delivering a fatal wound that penetrated into his heart and caused his death."

Atay is due to be sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court on Friday.