A FORMER SAS man who killed his ex-girlfriend with a hail of bullets from a Kalashnikov AK47 assault rifle failed today in a bid to have his murder conviction reduced to manslaughter.

The Court of Appeal in London rejected an argument that the jury which convicted Dr Thomas Shanks was given incorrect directions by the trial judge about his reasons for possessing the weapon, and that this undermined his defence of diminished responsibility.

The prosecution's case on the issue of intent to kill was "overwhelming", said Lord Justice Auld, sitting with Mr Justice Gray and Mr Justice Crane.

Shanks, who had worked as a senior house officer at Worcester Royal Infirmary, killed 21-year-old Vicky Fletcher after seeing her in a pub in Castleford, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, with her new boyfriend.

Shanks, aged 51, who had met the nurse in a hospital where he worked as an anaesthetist, admitted manslaughter, but was convicted of murder by a 10-2 majority following a retrial at Sheffield Crown Court in April 2000, after a previous jury, in Leeds, failed to reach a verdict. He was sentenced to life.

At the Leeds hearing, Shanks was convicted of possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life.

That conviction was disclosed to the re-trial jury by Mr Justice Jowitt, who then went on to tell the jurors that they could not question it.

In the appeal, defence lawyers argued that the conviction should not have been disclosed, and that the judge's directions about it prejudiced Shanks's credibility on the issues of diminished responsibility and provocation.

But Lord Justice Auld said that nothing the jury was told by the judge went to undermine Shanks's account of why he had the weapon or his credibility.

Shanks, who joined the SAS at the age of 18 and later left the Army to train as a doctor, served as a medic in the 1991 Gulf war and smuggled the rifle back to Britain from the Gulf.

His explanation was that, having been stabbed in Birmingham in the early 1980s, he wanted the gun to defend himself against anyone who attacked him.

But he denied possessing the weapon with "intent" to endanger life at the time of the killing in May 1998, when he fired 10 bullets into Miss Fletcher's body.