Shane O’Brien on the run after slitting throat of Joshua Hanson at RE Bar Hillingdon north London

A club-goer killed a 21-year-old with a single slash to the throat in an ‘act of pitiless savagery’ before going on the run for almost four years, a court heard today. 

Shane O’Brien brought a knife to the RE bar in Hillingdon, north west London on October 11 2015. 

After a row ensued between him and Joshua Hanson, 21, he produced the weapon and killed him with a ‘single slashing motion’, the Old Bailey was told. 

He went on the run and was finally arrested by police in March this year.    

Opening the prosecution case, Mark Heywood QC said: ‘For reasons that have yet to be fully explained, the defendant stood up, he approached the other man.

‘As they spoke briefly, with others around them, the defendant reached for his blade and with a single downward slashing motion, he used it.

‘He quite simply cut the throat of the man he was facing. 

‘You will judge for yourselves how best to categorised that even once you have heard all of the evidence. 

‘The prosecution will describe it as an act of pitiless savagery.’

He told the jury: ‘This case is all about the events that happened at the end of a Saturday night out in a north London bar.

‘For most there that night, none of them could have predicted what would happen, so sudden and shocking was it.

‘They had gone out in the company of others for a good time. 

‘But by two o’clock in the morning that followed one young man lay dead and another, a little older, was beginning a life on the run.’

Mr Heywood said O’Brien and Joshua Hanson did not know each other and went into the bar in separate groups of friends, adding: ‘Their paths crossed for only a matter of seconds, perhaps a few minutes at most.’

He said O’Brien, of no fixed abode, accepted bringing the knife to the bar and using it ‘to cause death’ but that he denied being responsible for the ‘fatal harm’ cause.

The QC said: ‘The prosecution says that he did it deliberately, intending to cause at least really serious harm.

‘One of the men was armed with an extremely sharp blade and the other one was not, he was wholly unarmed and that was the deceased.

‘There could be no justification in law for the killing he did. He denies that and says that even the blow was something that he did not mean to happen.’ 

The now-bearded father-of-two, of no fixed address, denies murder.

The trial, attended by Mr Hanson’s sister Brooke, mother Tracey and several of his friends, continues.