LONDON: The father of Sara Sharif, a 10-year-old girl who was found dead in her home in Britain, told police “I beat her up too much”, prosecutors said at his murder trial on Monday.
Sara was found dead in August 2023 at her home in Woking, a town southwest of London, after what prosecutors say was a campaign of “serious and repeated violence”.
Her father Urfan Sharif, 42, his wife and Sara Sharif’s stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, and the girl’s uncle Faisal Malik, 29, are on trial at London’s Old Bailey court charged with her murder.
The trio are alternatively charged with causing or allowing the death of a child. All three deny the charges against them and blame each other for her death, prosecutors say.
Prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones told jurors on the first day of the trial on Monday that Urfan Sharif called British police, having fled to Pakistan after Sara’s death.
“He used what you may think is an odd expression,” Jones said. “He said: ‘I legally punished her and she died’.”
Jones said that Urfan also told police: “I beat her up. It wasn’t my intention to kill her, but I beat her up too much.”
The prosecutor said a note in Urfan’s handwriting was also found next to his daughter’s body, which read: “I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it.”
Jones told the jury that each of Urfan, Batool and Malik “played their part in the violence and mistreatment which resulted in Sara’s death”.
The three defendants all deny responsibility for any of violence and abuse and each “seeks to deflect the blame onto one or both of the others”, Jones said.
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.
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.”
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, 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 a 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.”
Urfan blames his wife Batool, Emlyn Jones said, and his apparent confessions to the police were designed to “protect the true guilty party”.
The prosecutor added that Batool’s case is that Urfan Sharif was a “violent disciplinarian” and that she was scared of him, while Malik says he was unaware of any abuse or violence.
The trial is expected to run until December.
