A man accused of murder told friends he "enjoyed" battering a father-of-two with a fire extinguisher, a jury was told.

James Redmile-Gordon, 29, is on trial at Lewes Crown Court charged with murdering businessman Ovidiu Pop, who died after he was attacked on Brighton seafront.

The court has been told trouble flared after a scuffle broke out in the early hours of August 17 last year.

Redmile-Gordon and a group of friends had been out in the city and were waiting on Kings Road at about 5am for a lift home when a confrontation started with Mr Pop over comments said to have been made towards a female member of the group.

Redmile-Gordon, formerly of Cromwell Road, Hove, and now living in Horley, is accused of getting the extinguisher from a friend's car and hitting Mr Pop over the head with it.

Mr Pop, 28, of Greenleas, Hove, a Romanian national who ran his own groundwork company, was knocked unconscious and died in hospital a week later from his injuries.

James Weekes, a friend of Redmile-Gordon who had been out with him that night, told the court when they drove off he asked why Redmile-Gordon why he had hit Mr Pop.

Mr Weekes told the court Redmile-Gordon swore as he described what he had done, adding: “I want to kill him.”

He said Redmile-Gordon told them he had hit Mr Pop as hard as he could.

Mr Weekes said: "He said, ‘You should have seen his head come apart'.

“I said I didn’t want to know.”

Mr Weekes said Redmile-Gordon dumped the fire extinguisher in a communal bin outside a pub in Western Road before the pair went to the defendant’s flat where Redmile-Gordon's changed his clothes and put them in a bin liner. Shortly afterwards the police arrived.

But Mr Weekes admitted that he and others in the group had taken drugs that night, including cocaine, ketamine and ecstasy, and that his memory of what happened might be flawed by the drugs.

And during cross-examination he described Redmile-Gordon as a prankster and denied he was a violent man.

The trial continues.