A man has been convicted of strangling his wife while her online boyfriend was on a video link, and throwing her body hidden in a suitcase into a tributary of the River Thames.
Aminan Rahman, 46, was found guilty by a jury at the Old Bailey of murdering Suma Begum, 24, in a flat in east London on the night of 29 April last year.
The killing was witnessed by Begum’s two children, aged four months and two years, and her online boyfriend via a video call from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where he was living.
Rahman was caught on CCTV dumping the suitcase in the River Lea in east London. It was found washed up 10 days later containing her decomposed body.
The court heard that Begum’s boyfriend, Shahin Miah, 24, had recorded an online video of the events leading to her death, which was later handed to police.
Miah sobbed in court as he described a video call from Rahman in which Rahman threatened to kill Begum, who was on the bed in the background. Rahman also threatened to kill Miah, who was in the UAE at the time, the court heard.
Speaking through an interpreter, Miah said: “She wanted to run away and he then grabbed her throat.” There were “three screaming sounds” before the video froze and nothing more could be seen after Rahman’s initial lunge.
In a second video call from Rahman that night, the defendant told Miah: “Look, I have killed [Begum] and now you get ready.”
Begum married Rahman, a restaurant worker, in an arranged Islamic ceremony over the phone in 2019. In 2020, she travelled from Bangladesh to live with him and they had two children.
A year later, Begum met Miah via TikTok, later moving on to WhatsApp, and they had an “intimate, sexual” online relationship, the court heard.
The prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward KC had told jurors it was clear she was “no longer happy in her marriage, she was fairly openly in a relationship with another man, and she had expressed the desire to leave the defendant, something about which neither he nor her family were happy”.
“But whether he was motivated by rage, shame, or pure jealousy, or a more complex mix of cultural expectations and emotions, may not matter,” Ledward said.
Rahman had disposed of her body within minutes.
He accepted that he killed Begum, but claimed he never intended to harm her and had acted in the defence of the older child, whom he claimed Begum had threatened to kill. The prosecution rejected his claim.
Rahman had also been accused of attacking Begum in February last year.
Mr Justice Bennathan remanded Rahman into custody to be sentenced.DCI Kelly Allen, of the Metropolitan police, said detectives analysed hundreds of hours of CCTV to trace Rahman’s movements before and after the murder.
“We also managed to retrieve and download the full video call that Rahman made to Suma’s believed boyfriend. This further proved he killed her in a jealous rage,” she said.
