Tale of the wicked widow who wanted it all

With her immaculately coiffed copper-coloured hair, designer jeans and obvious cosmetic surgery, Jamila M’Barek was every inch the high-class Riviera call-girl.

Two-and-a-half years on remand had done nothing to break her spirit, and the late earl’s widow smirked and pouted her immaculately manicured way through her trial for his murder.

She twirled her hair girlishly as she gave evidence, cocking her head to one side as she told – rather languidly, as if the whole judicial process was too much of a bore to bother with — of her love for “le comte de Shaftesbury”, though her professions of conjugal devotion often trailed off into a mumbled “etcetera etcetera”.

Determined to put the hardships of her upbringing behind her, Jamila M’Barek had managed to forge a life of luxury thanks to the generosity — or susceptibility — of a string of wealthy men across Europe.

Born in 1961 in Lens, Jamila moved to Paris at 22 in a failed attempt to become an actress.

Around this time, she told a court psychologist, she was kidnapped, drugged and raped.

She seduced a wealthy Bordeaux vineyard owner and lived with him for two years before moving in the mid-1980s to St Tropez, where she had her first encounter with the Riviera jet-set, and met her first husband, Dutch businessman Raf Schoulten.

She left Mr Schoulten, and after a brief liaison with a wealthy New Yorker and German businessman, she met Lord Shaftesbury in 2002.

The circumstances of their meeting are disputed: Jamila claimed they met through a German friend, but the manager of a Geneva escort service told the court she introduced them, and said she knew Jamila was a “professional” – a prostitute.

Catherine Gurtler said: “Jamila has one goal in life, and that is to make money.

“When she wasn’t working for escort agencies, she was working in hostess bars. She just wanted to take advantage of the earl as much as possible.”

Ms Gurtler laughed at the idea that Ms M’Barek had been in love with Lord Shaftesbury, saying: “Jamila is a bitch. She manipulated him to get his money.”

She said the peer was going out with another girl, former page three model Natalie Lyons, when he met Jamila, and she spent two months working her way into his affections.

In October 2002, after they were married, Jamila convinced Lord Shaftesbury she was pregnant with his child, and as a result he changed his will to leave her 3 million-worth of property in France and Northern Ireland.

But by 2004 the relationship was on the rocks, the earl had met another, younger woman, and Jamila was afraid of losing her lucrative inheritance.

So to stop the earl divorcing her, she paid her brother to kill him.