A man has been cleared of murdering a British woman who was stabbed to death during a burglary at her home in Australia.

Emma Lovell, 41, was killed in North Lakes, Queensland, on Boxing Day 2022 as she fought off two intruders.

The mother died from a single stab wound to the heart and another man, who cannot be named because he was under 18 at the time of the attack, was jailed for 14 years in May after pleading guilty for killing her.

A second man, who was 17 at the time of the attack and cannot be named, appeared in the Supreme Court in Brisbane last week.

Judge Michael Copley, who heard the case without a jury, found the man not guilty of murder on Thursday as well as malicious wounding.

Found the defendant guilty of burglary and assault.

“I am not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was a party to this crime,” the judge said.

Ms Lovell had emigrated to Australia from Suffolk in 2011 with her husband Lee, who survived the attack, and their two daughters.

In his sentencing remarks in the original trial, Judge Tom Sullivan said Ms Lovell was described as “an energetic and loving mother, wife, daughter and sister”.

The court heard the couple tried to fend off the intruders after they were woken by the dogs barking at around 11.30pm.

Mr Lovell was injured during a “physical struggle directly outside the front door”, which then moved to the front lawn, where his wife was fatally stabbed.

Although the defendant was found guilty of robbery, he was spared the aggravating circumstance of being armed with an offensive weapon.

The prosecution argued that the accused “was aware at the time of the commission of all the offenses that his co-offender was in possession of a knife”, according to the sentence.

But Judge Copley said he could not be satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant knew his co-offender, ‘H’, was armed with a knife.

The judge also found that he could not be certain, under the criminal standard, that the man was “a party to this crime” nor that he was a party to the unlawful wounding of Mr Lovell or to the commission of a malicious act.

The defendant was convicted of assault occasioning actual bodily harm in company after the judge was satisfied that he was present on the lawn when “H” assaulted Mr Lovell “for the purpose of physically participating, if necessary, in the assault”.