VIRGINIA BEACH, Virginia (AP) — Carlos Cruz last saw his wife of 10 years on the morning of October 3, 2002, as she was getting ready to go to her job cleaning houses, he testified yesterday in the trial of sniper shootings suspect John Allen Muhammad.

Less than three hours later, his wife’s cousin called to tell him that Sarah Ramos had been killed, Cruz testified. Ramos, 34, was one of five people killed in random shootings that day in Maryland’s Montgomery County and one of the 10 slain in the sniper shootings that terrorised the Washington area for three weeks last year.

The shooting spree has been blamed on Muhammad and 18-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo.

Muhammad, 42, is on trial for only one of the 10 killings: The October 9, 2002, shooting of Dean Harold Meyers at a gas station in Manassas, Virginia. But prosecutors are presenting evidence from 16 shootings, including one in Louisiana, that they believe were committed by Muhammad and Malvo.

Prosecutors must prove multiple killings to get a conviction on one of the two death-penalty charges against Muhammad. Malvo, who was 17 at the time of the killings, goes on trial next month in the slaying of an FBI analyst.

During trial proceedings Tuesday, Cruz described how he met his wife, the mother of their eight year-old son, when they were neighbours in El Salvador. “She was a very religious lady,” Cruz said through an interpreter. “She had good morals.”

Ramos was shot as she sat outside a shopping centre. On Monday, jurors heard testimony about the shooting of Premkumar Walekar, who was shot about 25 minutes earlier at a gasoline station.

The court session began Tuesday with defense attorney Peter Greenspun objecting to prosecutors’ plans to play tapes of calls to emergency services from various shootings, saying they do not move the case forward because they don’t tell the jury anything about who may have committed the crimes.

“All it is adding is emotion in many instances to the case,” Greenspun said.

Prosecutor Paul Ebert countered that defense lawyers were “trying to sanitise the evidence.”

Circuit Judge LeRoy F Millette Jnr said he would permit the tapes because they are relevant to the prosecution’s case.