LONDON: A UK court on Tuesday handed life sentences to the father and stepmother of a murdered 10-year-old British-Pakistani girl who died after being subjected to a prolonged “campaign of torture” and “despicable abuse”.

Urfan Sharif, 43, and Beinash Batool, 30, will serve at least 40 and 33 years respectively for the killing of Sara Sharif.

London’s Old Bailey court heard that her body was found covered in bites and bruises with broken bones and burns inflicted by an electric iron.

Passing sentence, Judge John Cavanagh said Sara had been subjected to “acts of extreme cruelty” but that Sharif and Batool had not shown “a shred of remorse”. “The stress, pain and trauma that this campaign of violence will have caused to Sara is hard to contemplate,” he told them. “This poor child was battered with great force again and again,” he said.

Uncle Faisal Malik jailed for 16 years for ‘causing or allowing her death’

Sara had been beaten with a metal pole and cricket bat and “trussed up” with a “grotesque combination of parcel tape, a rope and a plastic bag” over her head, the judge said.

She was found dead in her bed in August 2023 at her empty family home.

A post-mortem revealed she had 71 fresh injuries and at least 25 broken bones.

The many injuries on her body demonstrated “the almost unbelievable torture to which Sara was subjected in the last weeks of her life”, Cavanagh said, adding she had been a “beautiful little girl full of personality” who had remained positive in the face of an unimaginable ordeal.

The day she died, Sharif hit Sara twice in the stomach with the metal leg of a high-chair as she lay unconscious on her stepmother’s lap, accusing her of pretending.

Sharif and Batool were found guilty last week after a 10-week trial at the Old Bailey in London.

Her uncle Faisal Malik, 29, was found guilty of causing or allowing her death. He was jailed for 16 years.

The day after Sara died, the three adults along with five other children fled their home in Woking, southwest of London and flew to Pakistan, from where her father, a taxi-driver, phoned the police to report her death.

‘Appalling’

After a month on the run, the three returned to the UK and were arrested on the plane after landing. The five other children remain in Pakistan.

There has been anger in the UK that Sara’s brutal treatment had been missed by social services after her father withdrew her from school four months before she died.

Sharif had gained custody of Sara in 2019 after separating from his first wife, despite allegations of being abusive towards his ex-wife.

Around March 2023, after seeing injuries on her face, Sara’s school referred the case to child services, who probed the incident but did not take any action. In April 2023, Sharif told the school that from then on Sara would be homeschooled.

Children’s Commi­ssioner Dame Rachel de Souza said: “There can be no doubt that Sara was failed in the starkest terms by the safety net of services around her.” “Even before she was born, she was known to social care — and yet she fell off their radar so entirely that by the time she died, she was invisible to them all.”

Sharif and his first wife, Olga, a Polish woman who was Sara’s birth mother, were well-known to social services.

In 2019, a judge decided to award the care of Sara and an older brother to Sharif, despite his history of abuse.

Published in Dawn, December 18th, 2024