Yvette Smith and Troy Ktori

A former Black Country kickboxing champion has been spared jail after helping a lovesick 47-year-old woman take revenge on the younger man who jilted her.

Spurned Yvette Smith doused Matthew Hipkins, who is 14 years her junior, with petrol and tried to set him alight after he ended their three-year romance.

Troy Ktori appeared before Wolverhampton Crown Court yesterday after giving Smith the phone number for a hitman. He told police: “She asked if I knew somebody who could beat someone up.

“I passed on the number. I may have been the middle man. That is all I have done.”

Mr Dean Kershaw, defending, said Ktori only thought the victim would get a “slap”.

Mr Kershaw added: “He took a telephone number and he passed it on to someone else and received no payment whatsoever.”

Ktori, aged 21, of Old Heath Road, Wednesfield, claimed not to know the name of the man Smith finally recruited to attack her former delivery driver lover with a baseball bat before she poured fuel over him.

Mr Hipkins was ambushed while making food deliveries to Penn Fields School in Birches Barn Road on June 24 last year, but managed to knock Smith to the ground before she could ignite the petrol.

Shocked school staff then rushed to help him and Smith was arrested. Mr Hipkins was taken to New Cross Hospital and needed seven stitches in a head wound.

Mother-of-one Smith, of Langley Road, Merry Hill, was convicted of attempted murder after a trial and jailed for six years in March.

Ktori admitted inciting unknown persons to cause actual bodily harm and was given a one-year prison sentence, suspended under supervision for 18 months.

Judge Michael Challinor told him: “I accept you believed this man was going to be assaulted and not seriously injured.

“But you played a part in organising this attack and it seems clear to me that you move in circles where you can organise this sort of thing.”

Mr Kershaw told the court that Ktori’s criminal past had dashed dreams of a successful kickboxing career.

He has previous convictions for a number of offences including assault.