Sara’s father tells UK police he ‘legally punished’ her, but she died

LONDON: The father of Sara Sharif fled to Pakistan after allegedly killing the 10-year-old and called police to say “I legally punished her and she died”, the jury at the Old Bailey heard at the opening of the trial.

Taxi driver Urfan Sharif, 42, is on trial at the Old Bailey accused of her murder alongside Sara’s stepmother, Beinash Batool, 30, and uncle, Faisal Malik, 28. Prosecutor William Emlyn Jones KC, opening their trial, said all the defendants had played a part in a “campaign of abuse” against Sara leading to her tragic death.

He told jurors that doctors found Sara had dozens of injuries including extensive bruising, burns and broken bones after her body was found in bed at her home in Woking, Surrey, on August 10 last year. The discovery came, said the prosecution, after her father called police at 2:47am crying so much that the operator told him to “take a deep breath and tell me what’s happened”.

Sharif told the operator: “I’ve killed my daughter. I legally punished her, and she died. She was naughty. I beat her up, it wasn’t my intention to kill her, but I beat her up too much.” The call last for around nine minutes.

When the police reached the family home in Woking, just out of London, they found the property was quiet and clean. The prosecutor, Emlyn Jones, said: “In an upstairs bedroom, on a bottom bunk bed, the police found the body of a little girl, lying in bed, under the cover, as if asleep. But she was not asleep. She was dead. Next to her body was a note in Urfan Sharif’s handwriting. It echoed what he had said in that 999 call.”

The note stated: “It’s me Urfan Sharif who killed my daughter by beating. I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it. “I am running away because I am scared. Sara died last August 8, two days before she was found.”

The following day, the whole family fled on a flight out of the UK, landing in Pakistan on August 10, meaning Sharif was thousands of miles away when he made the call to police, the court heard. An examination of Sara’s body revealed that Sharif played down in his call how much the child was tortured.

He said: “Sara had not just been beaten up. Her treatment, certainly in the last few weeks of her life, had been appalling. It had been brutal. And throughout, these three defendants were the adults living in the house where Sara had lived, where she had suffered, and where she had died. All three defendants played their part in the violence and it was inconceivable that just one of them had acted alone.”

Addressing the jury, Emlyn Jones said: “Ask yourselves, how could just one person have carried out so much abuse, so many assaults, without the others knowing about it and witnessing it with their own eyes? If any one of them was not part of it, but had seen it, why then was nothing done to stop it, or report it? Each of them denies that they were the one responsible for any of that violence and abuse. Each of them seeks to deflect the blame onto one or both of the others, to shift responsibility away from themselves, onto someone else. In other words, they are pointing the finger at each other.”

Sharif’s case was that his wife, Batool, was responsible for Sara’s death, that he made a false confession to protect her; Batool accused Sharif of being a violent disciplinarian and she was fearful of her husband; and Malik’s case is that whoever was responsible it was not him and he was unaware of what was going on, the jury heard.

The defendants have denied murder and causing or allowing the death of a child between December 16, 2022 and August 9, 2023. The trial before Justice Cavanagh is due to go on until December 13.