Hong Kong Police Arrest British Banker After 2 Women’s Bodies Are Found

HONG KONG — A 29-year-old British man has been arrested after the bodies of two women were found in his upscale apartment, the Hong Kong police said over the weekend. One woman’s throat had been slashed, and the body of the other was found decomposing, stuffed in a suitcase on a balcony.

The man, Rurik George Caton Jutting, was charged with the two murders on Monday at Hong Kong’s Eastern Magistrates’ Courts. He was identified as an employee of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, according to a person familiar with the company who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. A person with that name recently left the company, said Paul Scanlon, a Hong Kong-based spokesman for the bank.

Mr. Jutting called the police at 3:42 a.m. Saturday to ask that they investigate at his apartment in the Wan Chai district of the city, the police said in a statement. When they arrived, officers found a woman between the ages of 25 and 30 with cuts on her throat and buttocks. The woman, not yet identified, was pronounced dead at the scene. Later, the police found the second woman in the suitcase. That woman, identified in court documents as Ningsih Sumarti, was found to have died on Oct. 27.Mr. Jutting, who was in the apartment, was arrested.

One resident of the apartment building, who refused to give his name, said, “We noticed a strong smell about noon yesterday; it was like rotting fish or something. I think that was right before the police came, or right after, when they discovered the body.”

A spokesman at the British Foreign Office in London confirmed that a male British citizen had been arrested in Hong Kong and was receiving consular assistance. The spokesman did not identify the person.

According to Mr. Jutting’s profile on LinkedIn, he began his career at Barclays in 2008 after graduating from the University of Cambridge, where he studied history and law. He joined Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s London office in July 2010. He moved to the firm’s Hong Kong office in July 2013. The person familiar with the company said Mr. Jutting had resigned last Monday, though he remained in the company’s directory.

Bloomberg News reported that an automated email reply from Mr. Jutting’s work account said that the banker was out of the office “indefinitely” and urged the sender to contact someone who was not “an insane psychopath.” The report added that the automated reply also said, “For escalation please contact God, though suspect the devil will have custody.”

An attempt to email Mr. Jutting’s work address later in the day resulted in a message saying the email was not deliverable.

Murders are rare in Hong Kong. In the first seven months of this year, just 14 homicides were recorded in this city of 7.2 million. By comparison, 256 homicides were recorded in New York City, with a population of 8.4 million people, through Oct. 19 of this year, according to the New York Police Department.

One of the grisliest murders in Hong Kong involving a foreign resident occurred in 2003, when the body of Robert Kissel, an investment banker, was found in the storage room of his apartment four days after his death.

His wife, Nancy Kissel, was convicted of killing him in a case that came to be known as the “milkshake murder” after prosecutors said she had incapacitated him with a drug that she put in a milkshake before bludgeoning him with a brass figurine.

Michael Forsythe reported from Hong Kong and Michael J. de la Merced from San Francisco. Chris Buckley and Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Hong Kong.