Beatings, human bites, fractures, iron burns, confinement: nothing had been spared Sara Sharif, ten years old, killed in the family home in August 2023, and whose father, stepmother and uncle are currently on trial in London.
Since the trial began on October 14 at the Old Bailey, the abuse inflicted on the little girl has been a catalog of unbearable horrors.
Hours after his death, father Urfan Sharif, 42, mother-in-law Beinash Batool, 30, and uncle Faisal Malik, 29, bought plane tickets to Pakistan and flew with their four other children, abandoning his body on a bed.
There were 25 fractures, more or less old, which a pathologist could only explain by violent and repeated blows. Even the hyoid bone in the neck had been broken, probably by “manual strangulation”, according to this expert, Anthony Freemont.
Sara also had 70 marks of assault and battery. Traces of his blood were found on a baseball bat and a rolling pin.
DNA from her father and uncle was also detected on a belt, and Sara’s blood and hair were found on hoods made from plastic bags that were apparently taped to her head.
Friday, prosecutor William Emlyn Jones, repeating certain facts, recounted how the school, observing several months apart traces of blows on her face, had issued a report and questioned the little girl in March 2023.
The child did not want to answer, then hid his head in his arms. And without leaving this position, had accused his older brother, claiming that his mother-in-law had seen nothing.
Two weeks later, Beinash Batool had explained another mark by saying that Sara had injured herself with a pencil.
– “Possessed” –
But in WhatsApp messages exchanged with his sister Qandeela Saboohi between 2020 and 2023, the mother-in-law regularly accuses Urfan Sharif of beating Sara because “she is not wise”.
“She is covered in bruises, literally beaten to death,” she said in 2021, in messages that jurors were able to listen to this week. She also claims that the child is “possessed”.
Her teacher Helen Simmons told of a little girl who was once “happy” but sometimes “impertinent”, who in January 2023 had arrived at school wearing a hijab – the only one in the family to wear one – and who pulled on it to hide traces that ‘she didn’t want to explain.
In April 2023, the family moved three miles from West Byfleet to Woking (south-west London). Sara did not return to school.
Her father had warned that she would be home-schooled “effective immediately”.
Neighbors regularly heard screams, insults and blows.
Rebecca Spencer, who lived above the family in West Byfleet for two years, said she heard crying, door slamming and “clicking” sounds as if someone was trying to open a closed door. And the mother-in-law, insulting the little girl. “It was the mother-in-law who was screaming at Sara, she was screaming her name,” she testified.
In the accused box, protected by a plexiglass wall, the trio, who pleaded not guilty, listen with their heads down.
Urfan Sharif, a small, thin man with hard features, only raises his head to watch the images of their arrest on the plane that brought them back from Pakistan on September 13, 2023, after a month on the run.
In these images shown to jurors on Friday, he says he has no baggage. “I think you’re coming to get us,” said Beinsah Batool as she saw the police arrive in their plane which landed at London’s Gatwick airport.
After fleeing on August 9, 2023, Urfan Sharif called the English police the next day from Pakistan, to explain that he had “legally punished (his) daughter” who “was not good”. “I beat her, I didn’t want to kill her but I beat her too much,” he added, giving his address in Woking.
The police discovered the child’s body on a bunk bed covered with a sheet, with a handwritten note from the father who blamed himself for his death.
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