The girlfriend of Fico Dougan has told a court how she frantically tried to stop his killer fatally wound him with a knife.

A 16-year-old boy has gone on trial today accused an unprovoked attack on Fico Dougan, 17, in front of a two-year-year girl at a house in Ockley Road, Broad Green The defendant, the girl and her close friend Montana Riley, Fico's 18-year-old girlfriend, had been watching TV in the living room with the girl's two-year-old sister.

In footage of a police interview shown to the court, Miss Riley said she had never known the defendant to be violent.

She told detectives the teenager had been listening to music on his mobile phone in the hours before the attack.

She told them: "He said, 'When I listen to depressing songs I feel depressed, when I listen to love songs I feel sexually frustrated, and when I listen to rap music I want to stab up someone's face. He started clenching his fist. I thought it was weird but you don't think he actually would. He did not look serious."

Soon after, Fico tapped at the window and was let into the house by Miss Riley and joined the group watching TV, the jury was told.

Fewer than ten minutes later, the defendant rose from his seat and walking to the kitchen, grabbed a knife and returned to carry out the attack on Fico, the court was told.

Miss Riley also recalled her desperate bid to save Fico's life. She said: "He came out of nowhere and leapt over [the girl] to get to Fico. He was just stabbing Fico constantly. I tried to get between them and stop him. "He looked like he was trying to stab his face so I had my hands over his face and his heart."I was trying to talk to Fico and to see if he was breathing but he wasn't responding. His eyes had rolled back." Paramedics battled to save Fico's life, but he died in hospital.

The defendant denies murder. His defence lawyer, David Nathan, will argue for a lesser conviction of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility due to post-traumatic stress disorder.

He told the court the defendant's brother, with whom he was "very close," had died in the weeks before Fico's death. The court heard he had drunk a bottle of vodka the night before the killing, leaving him so drunk he threw up. Mr Nathan suggested Miss Riley and the teenage girl had been winding up the defendant before the attack.

The trial continues.