Sarah Everard: The lies Wayne Couzens told police after he was arrested

Met police officer claims he was in trouble with ‘Eastern European gang’

Wayne Couzens kidnapped Sarah Everard as she was walking home from a friend’s in south London (-)

The lies told to police by Wayne Couzens, a serving Metropolitan Police officer, can be revealed after he pleaded guilty to the murder of Sarah Everard.

Couzens, 48, appeared at the Old Bailey on Friday and admitted to killing 33-year-old Ms Everard. He had pleaded guilty to her kidnap and rape on 8 June.

The diplomatic protection officer, who joined the Met in 2018 , kidnapped Ms Everard as she walked home from a friend’s house in Clapham, south London, on the evening of 3 March.

He then raped and strangled her to death. Her remains was found in a stream inside a large green builders’ bag in a woodland area of Ashford, Kent, near land Couzens had bought in 2019.

It can now be reported that he had hired a car the previous day and bought a roll of self-adhesive film advertised as a carpet protector online days before Ms Everard’s kidnapping.

Then, on 5 March, CCTV footage showed Couzens buying two green rubble bags at B&Q in Dover. He also ordered tarpaulin and a bungee cargo net online for delivery on 7 March.

The story Couzens told police following his arrest on 9 March can also now be revealed.

The police officer claimed to be having financial problems, saying that he had got into trouble an Eastern European gang who threatened him and his family.

He claimed that the gang demanded he deliver “another girl” after he underpayed a sex worker a few weeks before.

Couzens alleged that after kidnapping Ms Everard, he drove her to Kent and handed her over to three Eastern European men in a van in a layby, still alive and uninjured.

Cell site data connected Couzens to both to the abduction and the area where Ms Everard was eventually found, both in the early hours of 4 March and in the days before his arrest.

Couzens was charged on 12 March.