London, Sep 22 (IANS) An Indian-origin woman was Tuesday jailed for at least 33 years - one of the longest prison sentences ever handed to a woman in Britain - for killing her two teenage daughters in a frenzied knife attack two years ago.
Rekha Kumari-Baker, 41, was sentenced at Cambridge Crown Court after a jury took just 35 minutes the previous day to find her guilty of murdering Davina Baker, 16, and Jasmine Baker, 13, as they slept in her Cambridgeshire home June 2007.

Judge David Bean said the Parole Board would not consider her for release until 2040, when she will be 72.

“Your defence of diminished responsibility was flimsy and insubstantial,” the judge told Kumari-Baker, who stabbed Davina 37 times and Jasmine 29 times with a kitchen knife in what the jury was told was a bid to “wreak havoc” on her ex-husband.

“You knew quite well what you were doing and you were not mentally ill. The crimes were, as the prosecution rightly put it, murder, full stop.

“Davina and Jasmine were cruelly cut down in the prime of life. Their death has been a shattering loss to their father, David Baker, and their friends.”

“Most people will find it inexplicable that a mother could kill her own children and you have given no explanation for it,” the judge added said.

Evidence at the trial showed that Davina - whose body was found kneeling on the floor - had put up a struggle.

After killing the girls, Kumari-Baker, a hotel worker, rang a friend to say: “I have done something terrible.”

In a hand-written note she left at the murder scene, she wrote: “I don’t want them to get hurt as I did.”

She concluded the note by writing: “My kids will not be a burden to anyone anymore.”

The father of Davina and Jasmine - sisters who were devoted to each other - spoke Tuesday of his “incalculable” loss.

Earlier, in a statement read out by his brother Monday, David Baker said of Kumari-Baker: “I take comfort in the knowledge that I will in time be with my girls again. She will not.”

“Not a day passes when I don’t think of my girls. Part of my heart was taken when they died and I long for the day when we shall be reunited.”