THE mother of a Glasgow man brutally murdered by an eastern European with a violent past has called for tougher criminal checks on immigrants.

Mark Giudici, 42, was punched, kicked, stamped on and strangled in his Toryglen home by Marek Kepczynski, 45, after the pair met at party and began drinking together in June last year.

The victim's mother Elsie Giudici was in court to see Kepczynski sentenced to 14 years behind bars after a gruelling two-week trial in January.

The 62-year-old from Rutherglen faces a daily struggle to cope with the violent death of her son. She has set up a shrine in her living room where Mark's ashes sit among framed photographs of the father-of-one.

"He was always smiling and joking," Elsie said, "but all I have now is a box of his ashes.

"Mark's in my head every second of the day. I break down regularly when I think about how he died.

"I write to him. I tell him how we're all doing. It helps with the pain. I just wish it could have been different."

Mark Giudici was a forklift truck driver who worked overseas and often spent time in Poland with friends.

He learned the language and acted as a translator for Kepczynski and his partner at a party on the night he died.

Elsie said: "Marek's girlfriend started talking to Mark about where he learned Polish and Mark was explaining he had friends that are Polish. It seems that Marek didn't like that.

"I don't know if it was a jealousy thing, because I know Mark would have been laughing and joking with Marek's girlfriend."

Mark later left the party with two friends and invited Marek to join them at his house in Toryglen, where they continued drinking.

Elsie said: "They seemed to be getting on well, according to Mark's friend, Paul. He told me his brother-in-law left first, at 10pm, then Paul left at 11pm. By 11.30pm my son was dead."

Kepczynski turned on Mark and inflicted 31 separate injuries before strangling him with his bare hands. It was the next day before Mark's family learned of his death.

Elsie said: "I came home from work and my daughter came running in and said: 'Mum. Mum. Mark's dead. Mark's dead.' The police had been to tell her they found his body.

"I couldn't believe it. I couldn't think. The police told me I had to go to the mortuary and ID him. They put him up on the wee screen and I knew it was my son."

After Kepczynski was jailed Elsie wrote to the murderer to ask why he did it but she has yet to receive a reply.

She also revealed she has since tracked down Kepczynski's girlfriend and they met recently for a coffee.

Elsie said: "I asked her if he had been convicted in Poland and she said he had been in prison three times. She said the least wee thing could set him off."

Elsie is now campaigning to make sure other mums don't face the same torment has had to deal with. She recently took her fight to Westminster.

Last week Tom Greatrex, MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West, presented a petition to the House of Commons which calls on the Government to stop foreign criminals coming in to the UK.

Mr Greatrex said: "If people want to come to the UK to work and live, I don't have a problem with that at all. But if they have a criminal history with some pretty alarming convictions, that information should be available so that the authorities will be properly aware.

"If they are aware the authorities may take a different attitude to whether these people should be allowed in the country. I don't think there's anything unreasonable about that."

Elsie said: "There has to be tighter controls. If they are decent people, coming here to work and make a better life for themselves, that's great. Mark always said that too. But I'd like to see tougher criminal checks on immigrants. I don't want any more mothers to feel how I feel."

Mr Greatrex recently raised Mark Giudici's case in Westminster with the Home Secretary Theresa May.

Ms May said: "It is a very serious case and our thoughts are obviously with his constituent.

"We want to ensure we have the maximum amount of information available that we can act on in relation to those who try to come into this country who have a violent history and that we can act properly to remove foreign national offenders from this country.

"Some of the tools that we need to be able to do that and will improve our ability to do that are things like the Schengen Information System. That's one of the tools that is already being used by other European nations.

"We have said we want to opt back into that and be able to actually therefore start to use that system which we haven't been able to do so up to this point."

peter.swindon@eveningtimes.co.uk