A MAN accused of murdering a father told a court he “feared for his life” when his alleged victim attacked him with a knife.

Darren McMinn, died on April 11, in Candido Pereira’s basement flat, in Chorley New Road, Bolton.

The body of the 48-year-old was discovered on May 3, in the Yarrow Reservoir, in Hodge Brow, wrapped in a carpet and plastic bags and weighed down with electrical transformer boxes.

Pereira, aged 37, has pleaded guilty to preventing unlawful burial of a body but had denied a charge of murder, claiming he acted in self-defence.

Taking the stand at Manchester Crown Court yesterday, Pereira told the jury he “categorically did not murder” father-of-one Mr McMinn.

Pereira claims the pair got into a fight after he asked Mr McMinn, who had come to his flat to take heroin, if he had stolen his previous cannabis grow that had been taken from his flat in January.

Pereira then claims Mr McMinn, who had injected heroin minutes beforehand, picked up a knife from a coffee table in the living room of the flat and “charged at him”.

He claims he picked up a dining room chair to defend himself from the knife attack.

He said: “I hit him with the chair and it broke into pieces.

“Then I got a second chair and he charged at me again with a knife, so I put the chair up.

“I swung the chair and he fell backwards and he hit my TV stand.

“I then jumped on top of him and my first instinct was to grab the knife from him because I didn’t want him to hurt me with it.

“He was struggling and throwing punches at me.”

Pereira, a former plasterer for Bolton at Home, alleged that the pair continued to fight and ended up back on the floor.

He then claims he grabbed a roll of tape and a vacuum cleaner cord to restrain Mr McMinn.

Pereira, who is originally from Lisbon but moved to the UK in 2004, said the pair stopped fighting but then Mr McMinn reached for a piece of broken chair to attack him again.

Pereira, then told the court that he wrapped the hoover cord around Mr McMinn’s body “to immobilise him” and began to pull it tight.

He said Mr McMinn “stopped moving” but he believed he was “pretending” to be dead.

He told the court he threw water on Mr McMinn expecting him to flinch.

When he did not, he said “his heart sank”.

Defending David Fish QC asked Pereira what he did after he realised that Mr McMinn was dead.

Pereira added: “I had a shower because I was covered in glass and blood.

“I then left the flat, I couldn’t bear it.

“My head was all over.

“I came to the decision of getting rid of the body.”

On April 13, at around midnight, Pereira and his friend Nicholas Hindle transported Mr McMinn’s body and dumped it in the reservoir, the court heard.

Defending Mr Fish asked why he did not ring the police after Mr McMinn’s death.

Pereira answered: “I had a cannabis grow and drugs in my flat that didn’t belong to me.

“I had already made the second worst decision of my life [to get rid of the body] so I had to continue to cover my tracts and clean up and get rid of the carpet.”

The trial continues.