Details of the trial for the murder of a British-Pakistani girl shock Britain

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The trial of three family members accused of murdering a 10-year-old British-Pakistani girl has shocked Britain as details of the horrific abuse she suffered emerged in court.

Sarah Sharif was found dead in bed – with broken bones, bites and burn marks all over her body – at her family’s home in Woking, southern England, in August 2023.

The discovery sparked an international manhunt for the relatives accused of the murder, after they fled to Pakistan the day before with Sarah’s five siblings.

Her father, taxi driver Urfan Sharif, 42, stepmother Beinash Batul, 30, and uncle Faisal Malik, 29, returned to Britain the following month and have been on trial since mid-October. They deny the allegations.

London’s Old Bailey heard that Sarah had 25 fractures, including the hyoid bone in her neck.

Pathologist and bone expert Anthony Fremont told jurors he concluded it was the result of “neck compression” most commonly caused by “manual strangulation”.

The girl had dozens of bruises, including bite marks, and her DNA, as well as that of her father and uncle, was found on a cricket bat and on both ends of a belt.

Sarah’s blood was found in a bag that was believed to have been placed over her head, and blood and hair were found on a piece of brown tape.

On Friday, jurors heard that Batul was the only defendant who refused to provide impressions of her teeth.

The court previously heard about WhatsApp messages she had sent to her sister over several years in which she said Sharif had hit Sarah for being “rude and unruly”.

“She is covered in bruises, literally blackened,” one of the reports says.

“A jinn lives in her,” Batul added, referring to supernatural beings from mythology that look like jinn.

Prosecutor William Emlyn Jones said on Friday that four months before her death, Sharif had told Sarah’s school that she would be home-schooled “with immediate effect”.

Around the same time the family moved a short distance from the town of West Byfleet to Woking.

By then, teachers had noticed bruises on her body, in June 2022 and March 2023.

When asked about bodily injuries, Sara did not want to answer and hid her head in her hands, the court noted.

Giving evidence earlier in the trial, teacher Helen Simmons described her as a “happy-go-lucky kid” who was sometimes “cheeky”.

Simmons said she saw bruises on her face twice, and when the girl did not provide specific details about her injuries, the school referred the child to custodial services.

That prompted Batul to confront her at school two weeks later and claim the marks were made with a pen, jurors heard.

Meanwhile, neighbors regularly heard screams, commotion and crying.

Rebecca Spencer, who lived below the family, said she could hear Batul “screaming”.

“I heard my stepmother yelling at Sarah,” she testified.

Spencer also said she heard what sounded like someone “locking themselves in the bedroom,” with the door “continually banging” as they “tried to open it.”

Sitting in the court behind Plexiglas, the three defendants listened Friday morning, bowing their heads.

Sharif – a short, thin man with a stern face – looked up to watch footage of their arrests at Gatwick Airport in September 2023 shown to the jury.

In body camera footage of the arresting officers, Batul raised her hand and said, “I think you’re looking for us.”

The day after fleeing Britain a month earlier, Sharif phoned British police from Pakistan to explain that he had “legally punished (punished) my daughter and she died”.

“I hit her, I didn’t want to kill her, but I hit her too hard,” he added, claiming she was “naughty”.

Police found Sarah’s body on a bunk bed covered with a sheet, along with a note in which her father claimed he didn’t mean to kill her, but wrote: “I lost it.”

The trial will continue next week.

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