A UK court on Thursday will hear the appeals of the father and stepmother of a murdered British-Pakistani girl, who were jailed for life after killing the child following years of torture.
The trial of Urfan Sharif and his wife Beinash Batool caused waves of revulsion in the UK as the horrific abuse suffered by the 10-year-old girl was revealed in a London court.
There was anger too at how the bright, bubbly youngster had been failed by all the authorities supposed to be in charge of her care.
London’s Old Bailey court heard that her body was found in her bed in August 2023 covered in bites and bruises with broken bones and burns inflicted by an electric iron and boiling water.
Passing sentence in December after the trial, 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”.
They had treated Sara as “worthless” and as “a skivvy”, because she was a girl. And because she was not Batool’s natural child, the stepmother had failed to protect her, he said. “This poor child was battered with great force again and again.”
fled their home in Woking, southwest of London, and flew to Pakistan with five other children.
Her father, a taxi-driver, left behind a handwritten note saying he had not meant to kill his daughter. After a month on the run, the three returned to the UK and were arrested after landing. The five other children remain in Pakistan.
There has been anger in the UK that Sara’s brutal treatment was missed by social services after her father withdrew her from school four months before she died.
Sharif and his first wife, Olga, 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.
The school had three times raised the alarm about Sara’s case, notably after she arrived in class wearing a hijab she used to try to cover marks on her body that she refused to explain.
Since December, the government has moved to tighten up the rules on home-schooling.
Sara’s body was repatriated to Poland, where her mother is from, and where a funeral was organised.
