After deeply shaking the United Kingdom a little over a year ago, the murder of little Sara Sharif saw its legal aspect end on Tuesday.
• Also read: Murder of a 10-year-old girl: life imprisonment for her father and stepmother
The father and stepmother of the British-Pakistani girl, who was beaten to death in August 2023 near London after years of abuse, have been sentenced to life in prison.
This story will certainly have marked the British public with its violence and the details which were revealed to the public during the trial.
A hundred injuries
The autopsy of the 10-year-old Anglo-Pakistani girl, out of school four months before her death on August 8, 2023, revealed around a hundred internal and external injuries including head trauma, multiple fractures – including 11 to the spine – bruises and scars, burn marks, including one from an iron, and at least six human bite marks. The little girl was also scalded.
His father, Urfan Sharif, 43, and stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, were found guilty of murder on December 11, 2024 at the Old Bailey court in London. His uncle Faisal Malik, 29, who lived with the couple in Woking (south-west London) was found guilty of “causing or making possible his death”.
The morning after Sara’s death, the trio flew to Pakistan with the five other children, leaving the little girl’s body on a bed.
AFP
Father’s confession
During the trial, Urfan Sharif, a taxi driver, first accused his wife, then admitted responsibility, while claiming that he did not want to kill Sara.
He had left a note next to his daughter’s body in which he admitted to having caused her death by beating her.
It was he who also informed the English police, confessing to his crime by telephone.
AFP
“I punished her legally and she died,” said Mr. Sharif. She wasn’t nice. I beat her, it wasn’t my intention to kill her, but I beat her too much.”
“It was me, Urfan Sharif, who killed my daughter by beating her,” he added. I’m running away because I’m afraid, but I promise that I will turn myself in to the authorities eventually to be punished.”
Mr. Sharif later dissociated himself from the comments he made, claiming that he said these words to protect his wife, a “violent disciplinarian” of whom he said he was afraid.
After a month on the run, the trio returned to the UK and were arrested on the plane. The five children are still in Pakistan.
Recurrent violence
Sara’s teacher told the trial of a little girl who arrived in class wearing a hijab in January 2023, the only one in her family to wear one, and who pulled on it to hide marks that she did not want to explain. Noticing traces of blows, the school issued three reports, without result.
By April 2023, the family had moved and Urfan Sharif announced to the school that Sara would now be homeschooled.
AFP
At trial, he admitted to having strangled his daughter several times with his bare hands – to the point of breaking a bone in her neck -, to having hit her with a cricket bat while she was tied up, or to hitting her with a cell phone on the head.
These attacks against Sara had “become routine, had been completely trivialized,” prosecutor William Emlyn Jones said at the trial.
Social services knew Urfan Sharif and Olga, Sara’s Polish mother whom he had met online, even before the little girl was born.
The two older children had been returned to their estranged mother from Sharif, before a judge decided to entrust Sara and an older brother to their father in 2019, despite his violent nature.
On the day of her death, while Sara lay limp on her mother-in-law’s lap, Urfan Sharif hit her twice in the stomach with the metal leg of a high chair, accusing her of “pretending.”
Beinash Batool, who looked after the six children during the day, chose to remain silent at the trial, as did Faisal Malik. None expressed remorse.
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