An Uber driver convicted of raping and murdering a British embassy worker in Lebanon has been sentenced to death, according to the country’s state-run news agency.

Tariq Houshieh, 30, confessed to strangling Rebecca Dykes with a rope then dumping her body by the side of the road after she got into his taxi following a night out in December 2017.

Ms Dykes, 30, had been helping the country deal with the influx of refugees from war-torn Syria and was due to fly back to the UK to celebrate Christmas with her family.

Lebanese judges routinely call for death sentences in cases of murder, but the country has an unofficial moratorium and has not carried out an execution since 2004

The British embassy said Ms Dykes ‘was much loved and is deeply missed’, adding thay they hope the sentence would ‘provide a degree of closure’ for those close to her.

However, they added that ‘the UK government continues to oppose the death penalty in all circumstances’.

Ms Dykes had worked at the embassy in Beirut as a policy manager for Britain’s Department for International Development since January 2017.

She had attended a colleague’s leaving party in the popular Gemmayzeh district and was abducted after leaving the bar at around midnight.

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