Paul Dalton, 35, told the Old Bailey that he cut up the body of Tae Hui Kang, 38, his Korean-born wife, into nine pieces with an electric saw before storing the pieces in a fridge and freezer. He denies murder, but admitted preventing the burial of a corpse.

Mr Dalton, from Kingston, Surrey, who jointly owned a successful language school with his wife, said that he accidentally killed her after suffering years of bullying at her hands. “She always got what she wanted. I was scared of her. Everyone was scared of her,” he said.

Mr Dalton told the jury that they had a row in May last year when his wife taunted him with an affair.

Ms Tae, he claimed, swore and shouted at him, cut up her plants and sliced family portraits in two, before telling him that she had slept with another man.

He wept as he told the court: “She was saying the most hurtful things. She was just saying she married me for the visa.

“She sat down in the chair. Her arms were folded. She started to say ‘Kill me, I want to die’,” he said.

Mr Dalton said that he put his hands around her throat when she lunged at him, adding that he hit her in a blind panic. “As she came forward I just lashed out at her. It just happened so quickly. I didn’t intend to hit her. I didn’t have anything in my mind,” he said.

Mr Dalton said that he went upstairs for a while and when he came back down his wife was where he had left her with blood coming out of her mouth.

“She was just gone — you know. She was lying dead,” he said. “She was not breathing. I looked into her face and she was gone,” he said.

Ms Tae had not died, but had only broken her jaw, counsel for the prosecution told the court. She could have survived but her husband abandoned her, it was claimed.

Mr Dalton, continuing his evidence, said that, in a blind panic, he decided to make it appear as if his wife had run away from home. He told friends that he did not know where she had gone, he said.

For the next few days after his wife’s death, Mr Dalton said that he left her body lying on the floor of their home. He also bought a Black & Decker electric saw, a freezer and a handsaw.

He then began to slice his wife’s body into nine pieces. Seven parts were put in the fridge and two in the family’s fridge freezer, the court was told.

He said that he left his wife’s body where he had hidden it and decided to go to Japan, to try to make sense of what had happened to him.

He returned to Britain after he received an e-mail from British detectives asking him to contact them, he said.

Mr Dalton, a teetotal computer specialist, met Ms Tae in 1994. He told the jury that from the beginning of their relationship she was a domineering and controlling girlfriend. “She always wanted to be in control,” he said.

She even stole his passport, he said, to stop him from getting away from her.

Mr Dalton, who said that his wife was his first girlfriend, added that he ran away from her on several occasions, but she caught up with him and pleaded for him to stay with her.

“I don’t know how she kept finding me . . . I just gave in. I just couldn’t get away . . . I thought she must really love me if she was so keen to get hold of me all the time,” he said. The couple married in 1997 without telling his parents, he said. Over time, she bullied him at work, and even denied him a wage from a business that he had set up, he claimed.

“As time went by, she just dominated every aspect of my life. It was total domination,” he said. “I didn’t get a wage. I didn’t get any money at all,” Mr Dalton said.

The trial continues.

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