A firefighter has relived the horror of finding the burning body of a murder victim.

Pauline Knowles-Samarraie, 72, had been bludgeoned with a heavy metal lintel before being doused with white spirit and set alight.

Her son-in-law Mohammed Soboh, 41, is on trial at Lewes Crown Court accused of her murder.

The jury was told Soboh, who was married to the dead woman before marrying her daughter, called 999 at about 1.30pm on April 22 last year.

When firefighters arrived at the bungalow where the family lived in Grand Crescent, Rottingdean, they discovered her body still blazing.

Firefighter Gavin Hall said he put on breathing apparatus and entered the smoke-filled property by an unlocked door to the conservatory.

He said: "I squatted down and I made my way in. I could see a glow and I made my way towards that. I located the casualty."

He said when he found the body, it was in a sitting position, upright against a glass door. He said she was still burning.

He said: "The fire was burning from the casualty's waist down, her legs and little bit of the surrounding floor.

"Her arms were raised slightly, rigid and she had clenched fists."

He said he tried to move her with the help of a colleague into the conservatory.

He said: "I got a hose reel and put the fire out which was on her legs and surrounding her.

The officer, based at Roedean Station, told the jury it was the first time he had dealt with a fire fatality.

Soboh, of New England Road, Brighton, denies murder. He claims he arrived home to find the bungalow on fire and could not reach his mother-in-law because of the smoke.

The court was told Mrs Knowles-Samarraie had a tragic life before being murdered. Born in Yorkshire, she met her first husband, an Iraqi, in the late Fifties when he was studying in the UK.

The couple, who had two children, moved to Iraq where her husband became deputy minister for oil. But he fell out with the regime of Saddam Hussein and he and his son, Mazin, were executed in the 1980s.

Mrs Knowles-Samarraie and her daughter had already fled to the UK.

She married Soboh in 1993 while in the US and he later married her daughter, Nada, with whom he had three young children.

The family moved to Rottingdean where she wrote her life story, I Never Said Goodbye, which was published in 2007.

The trial continues.