A BOYFRIEND who used a plaster cast on his broken arm to fracture his partner’s cheekbone during a fierce argument was spared an immediate prison term.

Unemployed Jordan Ingram, 21, of Buxton Close, Newport, who also kicked and bit his girlfriend, was handed a suspended jail sentence at Cardiff Crown Court.

The couple are no longer together and a two-year restraining order was imposed preventing him from contacting the victim.

The defendant was convicted by a jury last month of inflicting grievous bodily harm and criminal damage after a trial at the same court.

Ingram had spent five days in hospital following a “nasty motorbike accident” just before the attack, they were told.

He had claimed the complainant had “lunged” at him and denied fracturing her cheekbone, kicking her backside and biting her arm and finger.

Ingram pleaded not guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm and criminal damage by breaking her mobile phone on March 17.

The jury heard the victim say that she “still loved him”.

Giving evidence in his defence, Ingram told his barrister Hilary Roberts that he and his girlfriend had shouted at each other at his grandmother’s house.

He said the row had broken out because he wanted to “go and see the boys” so that he could “smoke a spliff”.

Ingram said he had recently broken an arm, wrist and thumb in biking accident and was “just happy I was alive”.

He claimed she wouldn’t let him go to see his friends and that they traded insults about her mother and his grandmother.

Prosecutor Peter Donnison told Ingram: “You assaulted her. You kicked her backside six or seven times. You pulled her up by the hair … You hit her using your plaster cast into the face.”

The judge, Recorder David Harris, jailed the defendant for 21 months, suspended for two years.

He also ordered him to carry out 150 hours of unpaid work, perform a 20-day rehabilitation and activity requirement and pay a victim surcharge of £140.