The father of the 10-year-old schoolgirl Sara Sharif killed her before fleeing to Pakistan and calling police to say he “beat her up too much” as a punishment for being naughty, a court has heard.
Sara’s body was discovered at the family home in Woking, Surrey, on 10 August last year alongside a handwritten note from her father, saying: “I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it.”
Sara’s father, Urfan Sharif, 42, her stepmother, Beinash Batool, 30, and her uncle Faisal Malik, 29, are accused of killing her on 8 August. The defendants, who lived together, are said to have carried out “a campaign of abuse”, with Sara being subjected to “repeated serious violence over a significant period of time”.
Opening the case at the Old Bailey on Monday, the prosecutor, William Emlyn Jones KC, said the postmortem examination of Sara’s body revealed a “terrible truth”.
He said: “When Urfan Sharif said in that call: ‘I beat her up,’ he came nowhere near to describing the extent of the violence and physical abuse that Sara had suffered, not just at the time of her death but repeatedly, over time. She had been the victim of serious violent assault and physical abuse for weeks and weeks, at least.
“The doctors found dozens of separate injuries, externally and internally, when they examined Sara’s body. They found she had suffered extensive bruising, burns, broken bones, old and new. So no, 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.”
The court heard that the defendants fled to Pakistan on 9 August and Sharif, a taxi driver, called police an hour after landing in Islamabad the following day, at 2.47am UK time. A recording of the eight-and-a-half-minute 999 call was played to jurors, in which a weeping Sharif told the operator: “I legally punished my daughter, and she died … I killed my daughter. I killed my daughter.”
A little later, when asked for more detail, Sharif added: “She was naughty over the last three, four weeks and I was giving her punishment to sort her out. I did something and she died.”
He said he was a “cruel father” and had fled home in a “panic” but refused to say where he was.
Police found Sara’s body under a pink sheet on a bottom bunk bed at the family’s clean and tidy home after the 999 call. Next to her body was a note saying: “It’s me Urfan Sharif who killed my daughter by beating. I’m running away because I am scared.”
A postmortem examination found that Sara had “an awful constellation of injuries”, including fractures that were evidence of “multiple episodes of blunt force trauma inflicted over several weeks”.
Doctors concluded there had been incidents of “manual strangulation” and “other, perhaps even more disturbing” injuries, including probable human bite marks to Sara’s arm and inner thigh. The prosecutor said dental records provided by Sharif and Malik indicated they were not responsible for the marks, while Batool had refused to provide an impression.
The prosecutor said the experts concluded Sara had been burned by a hot iron and had been tied up and restrained, perhaps for lengthy periods. He added that matching injuries to Sara’s ankles suggested “hot liquid encountered both feet while they were close together”.
The prosecution alleges it is “inconceivable” that any of the defendants could have carried out the “campaign of abuse” on their own and that they are all responsible for Sara’s death.
“None of them ever reported Sara’s abuse to any outside agency, who could have intervened. Sara’s medical records tell us that none of the injuries she received was ever reported or shown to a doctor, let alone treated, nor shown to staff at her school. No outside help was called,” the prosecutor said.
The court also heard that Batool made a “calm” call to a travel agent inquiring about flights to Pakistan on the evening of 8 August 2023 as Sara lay dead in the house.
The jury was played a recording of the phone call in which Batool asks about flights to Islamabad for the entire family – apart from Sara.
“What is entirely obvious is that just as no medical help had ever been sought for Sara in life, so it was that now there seems to have been no question of a call to 999 from the house, to seek emergency care in her dying moments, nor to report her death while those responsible were still on the premises. Their flight to Pakistan was their priority,” the prosecutor said.
The defendants have pleaded not guilty to murder and to causing or allowing the death of a child between 16 December 2022 and 9 August 2023.
The court heard that there was “a big old conflict brewing between these defendants” with each seeking to deflect the blame on to one or both of the others.
Sharif has claimed that his wife, Batool, was responsible and that his apparent confession was to protect “the true guilty party”. Batool in turn has accused Sharif, describing her husband as “a violent disciplinarian who regularly assaulted Sara”. Malik has denied responsibility, claiming he was “entirely and blissfully unaware of any abuse or assault of Sara by anyone at any time”, the prosecutor said.
The trial before the judge Mr Justice Cavanagh is expected to go on until 13 December.
• This article was amended on 16 October 2024 because Faisal Malik is 29, not 28 as an earlier version said.
