The Albany Gazette - UK court to sentence father, stepmother for killing daughter

Sara Sharif was just 10 when she was found dead in her bed in August 2023, her body covered in bites and bruises, with broken bones and burn marks.

A post-mortem revealed she had more than 100 injuries, and at least 25 broken bones.

Her father Urfan Sharif, 43, admitted beating her with a cricket bat, as she was bound by packaging tape in the weeks before her death. He also throttled her with his bare hands, breaking the hyoid bone in her neck.

Urfan Sharif and Sara's stepmother, Beinash Batool, 30, 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.

The day after Sara died, the three adults had fled their home in Woking, southwest of London, flying to Pakistan with five other children.

Her father, a taxi-driver, phoned the police on the way to the airport to report Sara's death, and left behind a handwritten note saying he had not meant to kill his daughter "but I lost it".

- '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.

Her teacher told the court how she had arrived in the class wearing a hijab, which she used to try to cover marks on her body which she refused to explain.

Sharif had gained custody of Sara in 2019 after separating from his first wife, despite allegations of being abusive towards his ex-wife, the jury was told. Sara was also in and out of foster care.

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.

The family moved house in April 2023, and Urfan Sharif told the school that from then on Sara would be homeschooled.

"None of us can imagine how appalling and brutal Sara's treatment was in the last few weeks of her short life," Libby Clark from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said after the conviction.

- 'Failed' -

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, even before she was born.

She and two older children had been placed in care after being abused, before being returned to their mother when the couple separated.

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

The day she died, Urfan 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 the child of pretending.

Beinash Batool and Faisal Malik did not address the trial, and have not voiced any remorse for their actions.

Her case is the latest in a string of child cruelty cases that have triggered public revulsion alongside repeated pledges from authorities to "learn lessons" and prevent further tragedies.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed after Wednesday's verdict to boost safeguards for home-schooled children.

(Y.Harris--TAG)