A FORMER Hampstead School pupil has denied gunning down a teacher celebrating her birthday claiming he was taking drugs elsewhere at the time, a court heard. 

Hassan Hussain, 29, of Willesden Green, told the Old Bailey that he did not murder Sabrina Moss, 24, in a hail of machine gun fire as she stood outside a takeaway in Kilburn High Road in August last year.

The mother of one was shot through the chest by a Mac 10 submachine gun and sawn-off shotgun as she chatted to two men. She died soon afterwards. 

Her friend Sabrina Gachette, 24, was seriously injured but survived, alongside Mahad Ahmed, 23, and Edson Da Silva, 27.

Mr Hussain, who grew up in Brondesbury Park, is accused of being involved in “significant conflict” between two warring “gangs” – the Kensal Green Boys (KGB) and the South Kilburn Gang – of which Ahmed and Da Silva are allegedly members.  

Mr Hussain took to the stand on Tuesday to claim he knew nothing about the killing and had passed the evening trying to get into nightclub Love and Liquor, in Kilburn High Road “to party”, taking “fake crack” and MDMA and calling two women he was “seeing”.

In text messages read out to the court he told a friend that the shooting was “f****ed up man”.

The message was stored in his predictive text dictionary after he deleted all messages from his phone four days after the killing, the court was told. 

Mr Hussain said it was “not unusual” for him to regularly delete them in order to prevent his wife from seeing messages from other women. 

The court heard that Mr Hussain was jailed for five years in 2006 for stabbing a man after catching him in bed with his ex-girlfriend. 

He is jointly charged alongside Martell Warren, 22, of Kensal Green, and Yassin James, 19, of Wembley, with murder, three attempted murders, two counts of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life, and conspiring to commit grievous bodily harm. Simon Baptiste, 29, from Cricklewood, pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm after allegedly letting the gunmen use his house as a base for the killing. The trial continues.