Details of the murder trial of British-Pakistani girl Shock UK

Text size

The trial of three family members accused of murdering a 10-year-old British-Pakistani girl has shocked Britain as details of the horrific abuse she suffered emerged in court.

Sara Sharif was found dead in bed – with broken bones, bites and burns throughout her body – at her family’s home in Woking, southern England, in August 2023.

The discovery sparked an international manhunt for the family members accused of the murder, after they fled to Pakistan with five of Sara’s siblings the day before.

Her father, 42-year-old taxi driver Urfan Sharif, stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, and uncle Faisal Malik, 29, returned to Britain the following month and have been on trial since mid-October. They deny the accusations.

The Old Bailey court in London heard that Sara had 25 fractures, including the hyoid bone in the neck.

Pathologist and bone specialist Anthony Freemont told the jury he concluded this was the result of “neck compression”, usually caused by “manual strangulation”.

The boy had dozens of bruises, including bite marks, while her DNA as well as that of her father and uncle were found on a cricket bat and both ends of a belt.

Sara’s blood was found in a carrier bag believed to have been worn over her head, while blood and hair were found on a piece of brown tape.

Jurors heard Friday that Batool was the only defendant who had refused to have dental impressions taken of her teeth.

The court had earlier heard WhatsApp messages she had sent to her sister over several years in which she reported that Sharif had hit Sara for being “rude and rebellious”.

“She is covered in bruises, literally blackened,” said one message.

“She has a jinn inside her,” Batool had added, referring to ghost-like supernatural beings from mythology.

Prosecutor William Emlyn Jones revealed Friday that Sharif had told Sara’s school four months before her death that she would be homeschooled “effective immediately.”

Around the same time the family moved the short distance from the town of West Byfleet to Woking.

By then, teachers had noticed bruises on her body, in June 2022 and March 2023.

When asked about the injuries, Sara would not answer and hid her head in her arms, the court heard.

Teacher Helen Simmons gave evidence earlier in the trial, describing her as a “happy child” who would sometimes be “cheeky”.

Simmons told how she noticed bruises on her face on two occasions, and when the girl had not given a consistent account of her injuries, the school had referred her to watchdog services.

That prompted Batool to confront her at school two weeks later and claim the marks had been made with a pen, jurors heard.

Meanwhile, neighbors regularly heard shouting, commotion and crying.

Rebecca Spencer, who lived among the family, said she would hear Batool “screaming.”

“I heard the stepmother yelling at Sara,” she testified.

Spencer also said she heard noises that sounded like someone was “locked in a bedroom,” with “the constant rattling of the door” as they were “trying to get it open.”

Sitting in the courtroom behind plexiglass, the three suspects listened with their heads bowed on Friday morning.

Sharif – a short, thin man with hard features – looked up and saw clips of their arrests at Gatwick Airport in September 2023 shown to the jurors.

In the body camera footage of arresting officers, Batool raised her hand and said, “I think you’re looking for us.”

The day after fleeing Britain a month earlier, Sharif had called British police from Pakistan to explain that he had “legally punished my daughter and she died”.

“I hit her, I didn’t want to kill her, but I hit her too much,” he added, claiming she had been “naughty.”

Police found Sara’s body on a bunk bed covered with a sheet, next to a note in which her father claimed he did not intend to kill her, but wrote: “I lost it.”

The trial continues next week.

bd/yy/cw