A man who plunged a six-inch kitchen knife into a fellow drinker’s neck for pouring a pint of beer on him in an Ilford pub has been jailed for nine years today.

Iaindes Jeremciuk, 31, ambushed 26-year-old countryman Mantas Kesminas as he left The Black Horse in Chapel Road, piercing an artery with a single vicious blow.

Mr Kesminas lost a litre of blood but survived after quick-thinking police officers gave him instant first aid and rushed him to hospital in a police car.

Jeremciuk was locked up for nine years after he admitted inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent.

Snaresbrook Crown Court heard that at the time of the stabbing he had just completed a prison term for deliberately ramming his car into a group of men he had seen talking to his girlfriend.

Passing sentence this morning judge William Kennedy told him: “You have had for the last few years an enormous problem with alcohol.

“It is that, frankly, which has ruined your life.

“Combined with the taking of desperate drugs, it has reduced you to someone who had on that night no proper control at all.”

As he was led to the cells, a tearful Jeremciuk called out in Lithuanian to weeping family members in the public gallery.

Jonathan Foy, prosecuting, said on March 30 Jeremciuk, of no fixed address, went on a 10-hour drinking session.

By that evening, he was in The Black Horse with his father.

They began talking to a group of fellow Lithuanians they had not met before, among them Mr Kesminas, and the two groups drank beer and played pool together.

Mr Foy said that at around 11pm, a dispute arose which culminated in the defendant’s father “taking him out of the public house”.

Jeremciuk tried to run away but was arrested.