Bielefeld, Germany - A Turkish man was sentenced to life imprisonment on Monday for brutally murdering his wife on New Year's Day, near the north-western German town of Guetersloh.

The 27-year-old confessed to having stabbed his 18-year-old wife repeatedly and beaten her with a billiard cue, before driving over her three times. The woman, who was also his cousin, bled to death.

"You were the devil incarnate, who carried out this deed," judge Jutta Albert said in response to a letter which the defendant wrote in prison describing himself as being posessed during the crime.

The prosecution said the husband had been driven by extreme jealousy.

Throughout the trial, members of the family of both victim and the accused had expressed anger, shouting abuse at the defendant. Several people were led outside before the verdict was pronounced.

The couple had wed through an arranged marriage in Turkey in 2007. However, the woman returned to her native Germany where she turned her back on her husband.

Albert said their ambivalent relationship had torn her up inside, while witnesses said the 18-year-old had said of her husband, "He's an idiot. And he's annoying."

The man eventually travelled illegally to Germany and the couple were reconciled, despite previous death threats he had sent by text message from Turkey.

On the night of the murder, events were sparked by a row over a mobile phone, the defendant told a psychologist. His wife had not wanted him to access her phone and monitor who she had been in contact with, it seemed.

The judge described the 27-year-old as "narcissistic," and therefore easily upset by jealousy or wounded pride.

After three unsuccessful attempts to unlock the phone placed an automatic block on the handset, this apparently drove the husband over the edge.

The couple were sitting in a car at the time and the defendant pulled out a fruit knife and stabbed at his wife.

She escaped from the car but he continued stabbing and hitting her, then drove the car over his dying wife. By the end of the ordeal she had been blinded, as the knife had also entered her eyes.

An expert witness found the defendant to be fully responsible for the murder, despite the "overkill" of his actions.

The judge said the man had decided his wife did not deserve to live, and was playing god with her life.

"The court had to make discoveries that would freeze the most hardened person," Albert said.(dpa)