A WAITER told a murder trial how he found the dying husband of a cheating wife from Lancashire in a hotel room in Pakistan.

Manchester Crown Court has been told 24-year old Yasira Pervez and her lover Ian Priddle, 46, plotted to resolve their love triangle by permanently removing 21-year-old Khurrum Mukhtar `from the equation'.

The pair travelled secretly on Christmas Eve two years ago to Islamabad, and it is alleged that five days later they stabbed him to death.

Two people matching their description were seen going into the Comfort Inn Hotel, in Rawalpindi, on December 30, 2006, and within half an hour Mr Mukhtar was found gasping for breath on a bed after being repeatedly stabbed in the chest and abdomen.

Hotel waiter Arshad Mahmood told the jury he saw the couple, both wearing dark glasses and baseball caps, coming into the hotel. Twenty minutes later he saw them leaving.

He told the court: "They were running and looked very agitated."

He went to check room 109, which the couple had been to, and saw Mr Mukhtar lying on the bed, clearly badly injured.

The court had earlier been told that Pervez and Mr Mukhtar, who were cousins, went through an arranged marriage in 2004.

She then returned to her family home in Pendle Street, Accrington, with the intention of helping get a visa for her new husband.

Instead, she started an affair with Priddle, of Jubilee Road, Haslingden. Both deny murder.

Proceeding