The widow of the Earl of Shaftesbury will go on trial today charged with his murder.

Jamila M'Barek, 45, is alleged to have paid her brother Mohammed to strangle her estranged husband, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, whose decomposed body was found in a remote ravine in the south of France in April 2005.

The flamboyant 10th earl failed to return to his home in Hove after vanishing from his hotel in the French Riviera resort of Cannes five months earlier.

Ms M'Barek and her brother both deny murdering the Earl, but Mohammed M'Barek has confessed to killing the aristocrat accidentally following a drunken argument.

The siblings both admit putting his corpse into Mohammed M'Barek's convertible BMW before dumping it into a ravine.

Ms M'Barek, a former nightclub hostess, married Lord Shaftesbury in 2002.

Prosecutors are expected to argue that she feared being cut out of his will after he asked another woman to marry him.

But Ms M'Barek is expected to tell the trial in Nice, in the south of France, that her past associations with rich, powerful men meant she had no need of the money.

The defence team will claim the earl was a violent alcoholic addicted to sex and that she was an abused wife driven to despair by his affairs.

Lawyers for the earl's family insist he was the victim of a premeditated murder for money.

Sussex Police sent officers to help French detectives in their search for the earl in the days after his disappearance.

French judicial authorities reportedly questioned Ms M'Barek in September last year about the transfer of 150,000 euros (£101,000).

The earl, who was educated at Eton and Oxford, inherited his title from his grandfather at the age of 22, along with the 9,000-acre family estate in Dorset.

Ms M'Barek denies premeditated murder.

The trial is expected to last three days.