A WIDOWER sobbed as he told a court how he found his wife hanging in their bathroom on the same day he is accused of attempting to murder a schoolgirl in a car crash.

Chef Lukasz Jarosz is accused of crashing his Skoda Superb car at a junction of the A36 at Wilton on January 6, just hours after he had found his wife, Aneta, hanging in their bathroom.

The 35-year-old is on trial at Bournemouth Crown Court for a charge of attempting to murder the youngster, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and who suffered a fractured leg in the impact. He denies the charge.

The Polish national has admitted a second charge of causing serious injury through dangerous driving.

Speaking through an interpreter, Jarosz said he had been for a hospital appointment that morning and afterwards had a lie down at his home in Wilton and when he woke up he found his wife was in the locked bathroom.

Weeping, the defendant said: "I went to look in the bathroom but the door was locked, I returned to the kitchen to get a knife to open the door.

"I saw my wife hanging and I cut her off and I started to cuddle her and (she) was already all bruised. I then put my wife on our bed and I folded her hands, I cuddled her for an awful long time and I cried and I screamed: 'Why did you do this, why this?"

He said that when he was driving the schoolgirl later that day he "had no plans whatsoever" of what he intended to do.

He added: "I can't remember half of the things, I know I had teary eyes. I remember nothing else, I do not remember the accident, nothing.

"I couldn't basically collect myself, to hold it all together after I had cut my wife off.

"I was just driving around in circles. My memory stops with the moment I cut my wife off."

He said he did not remember allegations that he unclipped the girl's seatbelt shortly before the accident or that he prevented her from leaving the car.

The court heard that Mrs Jarosz, who had completed a medicine degree before moving to the UK, had previously talked about taking her own life and had made an earlier suicide attempt.

Jarosz said that he had arranged for his wife to see a psychologist but she had cancelled the appointment.

He said she had repeatedly insisted that he had been unfaithful to her, which he denied.

He added: "We were always together, we went everywhere together."

The court heard that Jarosz was initially arrested on suspicion of murder of his wife but following an inquest into her death which found that she killed herself, police decided to take no further action in relation to her death.