Sara Sharif’s evil father faces life in prison today for the murder of the schoolgirl failed by authorities after a decade of missed opportunities to stop a monster.
Urfan Sharif beat his 10-year-old daughter to death in an act of unspeakable brutality after spending 16 years torturing women and children.
The next day the 42-year-old taxi driver fled to his native Pakistan with his wife and willing accomplice Beinash Batool, 30, thinking he would get away with it after police repeatedly failed to bring charges when assaults were reported by three women and two children.
But now finally Sara’s father and stepmother face a lifetime behind bars after both were convicted of murder today.
Batool wept in the dock as she was convicted but Sharif showed no emotion.
His brother Faisal Malik, 29, was also convicted of causing or allowing her death.
The shocking case has raised questions about failures by police, social services and Sara’s school who missed 15 opportunities to save the vulnerable pupil before Sharif savagely battered her to death with a metal pole as she lay barely conscious dying in Batool’s arms on August 8 last year.
An independent safeguarding review has been ordered into her murder which will examine the circumstances in which a family court judge decided to place the victim in the custody of her cruel father and stepmother in a fateful decision that ultimately would cost her life.
Over the following years Sara suffered an unimaginable ordeal at the hands of the despicable pair, who bound her arms and legs and hooded her in a plastic bag secured with parcel tape around her head while they battered her with a cricket bat, metal pole and a rolling pin, strangled her until her neck broke, burnt her with an iron and bit her.
1. January 2013 – Sara Sharif is made subject to a child protection plan at birth due to her father Urfan Sharif being accused of attacking three women including her mother, as well as hitting and biting two children. But she is allowed to remain with her father.
2. February 22, 2013 – Social services and police are told Sharif has slapped a child around the face. Nothing is done.
3. May 7, 2013 – A social worker spots a burn mark on a child’s leg. Sharif had failed to report the incident and claimed it was a BBQ accident. Nothing is done.
4. October 7, 2013 – A child is seen with a burn mark sustained from a domestic iron. Sharif told social services the child had knocked into the iron. No action is taken
5. 2013-2014 – A child tells a social worker that Sharif smashed up a TV and punched Sara’s mother Olga.
6. November 2014 – Sara is taken into foster care after a child tells a social worker about a bite mark. But she later returns to live with her father following a family court hearing in October 2019 where social services recommend she should stay with him because that is her preference.
7. January 2015 – Sharif is reported to social services for waving a knife around at home in what he said was a ‘zombie’ game. Social workers note that Sharif hit and kicked Olga at home and the pair threatened to kill each other.
8. February 2015 – A child tells their foster carer that Sharif used to hit them on the bottom with a belt. In September the child is heard to say to Sharif, ‘when you’re at home you hit and kick me every day’.
9. 2015 – Olga tells social services that Sharif tightened a belt around her neck. Around this time social workers complain Sharif is coercive and derogatory towards them.
10. December 2016. A child tells a social worker they don’t like Sharif because he punched them all over their body and gave them lots of bruises. Social workers observe that Sara flinches when Sharif tells her off during supervised contact and she seems surprised when he cuddles her.
11. June 6, 2022 – A teacher reports that Sara has a bruise under her eye to the school’s online child protection monitoring system. Sara initially will not say what happened, before claiming another child hit her.
12. March 10, 2023 – A teacher sees bruises on her face. Sara says she had fallen on roller skates. When Sara gives a different story to a safeguarding lead, the school makes a referral to social services. Six days later social services decide to take no further action.
13. March 20, 2023- A report is logged on the school’s internal system after Sara’s stepmother Beinash Batool is overheard referring to children as ‘motherf***er, sister f***er, b**** and whore’ in the playground.
14. March 28, 2023 – Batool claims to a teacher that a mark on Sara’s face is caused by a pen. The teacher tells the school’s safeguarding lead.
15. April 17, 2023 – Sharif decides to home-school Sara. The school rings the council for advice and is told it should make a referral if there are concerns. Staff see Sara later that day at school pick-up and she seems fine so they decide against it, even though she had been beaten earlier that day. She is never seen outside the home again.
When police found her broken little body dumped under the pink covers of her bunk bed by her fleeing family there were so many injuries- at least 71 externally and 29 fractures – that it was impossible to say which wound caused her death.
Now after her father’s conviction, it can be revealed that:
The manipulative bully first came to police’s attention in December 2007 after his 18-year-old girlfriend Angelika jumped out of a window to escape Sharif who held her at knifepoint threatening to kill her.
Sharif was arrested for false imprisonment, assault, theft and criminal damage, but police said there was ‘insufficient evidence to progress the investigation’.
‘Urfan has two faces. One is kind, nice, very lovely and always apologises,’ Angelika told the Mail. ‘But the second face, the one people don’t see, it is the devil.’
During their toxic relationship, he punched her in the face and stole her passport, but she was too afraid to leave until she miscarried his child.
‘That was the worst thing that ever happened to me,’ she says. ‘But now, in some dark way, I feel lucky that this did not happen to my child.’
A subsequent girlfriend aged 31 was held captive for five days while Sharif sent off her passport for a marriage application in April 2009, but again police said there was insufficient evidence to charge him with false imprisonment.
Within months of meeting Sara’s mother Olga Domin, he was arrested for assaulting her and two children after Olga said she had been held captive in November 2010.
But yet again police released him without charge after Sharif claimed he was the real victim.
Ms Domin told Polish TV channel Uwaga of his sadistic abuse: ‘Once, he tried to set me on fire, poured oil on me, but his cousin stopped him. He simply locked me in a room. Locked me in all day until the police arrived.’
Social services were called repeatedly after children suffered unexplained bruises, bite marks, scratches and burns, but Sharif managed to hoodwink them playing on his wife’s vulnerability and broken English to blame Olga or even other children for inflicting the wounds.
Ms Domin recalled Sharif would even offer children chocolate if they hit her and he later encouraged a teenager to emulate his sadistic cruelty.
The convicted thief spent his time drinking and gambling, eventually leaving Ms Domin to fly to Jhelum where he secretly married his cousin in an Islamic ceremony before he returned to embark on a third marriage with Batool.
Sara was taken into foster care in 2014 after reports of children being burnt, slapped and bitten.
But a family court decided to award Sharif custody in 2019 after Ms Domin was blamed for the attacks.
Her distraught mother told the Mail she had lost all faith in authorities in Britain: ‘Did you think I was such a terrible, unfit mother?’
‘They had Urfan’s file, showing how violent he was, didn’t they? If they had taken that into the system, Sara would still be alive.’
Sharif’s abuse accelerated after he was handed custody, with daily beatings so bad that Sara was forced to wear a hijab to conceal her injuries.
Neighbours reported hearing ‘gut-wrenching screams’ and the sound ‘like someone had been hit or smacked’ coming from the home in Woking, Surrey where Sara was treated as a domestic slave.
Teachers noticed Sara’s bruises as early as June 2022, but the scared pupil would pull down her hijab and brush off injuries as accidental.
When the school made a referral to social services in March 2023 about bruises on her face, the case was closed with no further action just six days later.
A month later Sharif was withdrawn from class to be home schooled and was never seen alive outside the home again.
After her death, Sharif and Batool calmly made plans to flee, calling up a travel agent just an hour later to book flights to Pakistan after jet washing her bloodied body, hiding the wounds in fresh clothes and arranging Sara’s body in bed to look as if she was sleeping.
Only when he had landed in a country with no extradition treaty did Sharif call 999 from Pakistan to say: ‘It wasn’t my intention to kill her, but I beat her up too much.’
Even when he was forced to return to the UK, Sharif continued to deny murder describing Batool as the ‘real villain of the piece’, just as he had done with every other partner.
During the two-month trial, the pitiless abuser blamed everyone but himself, drawing gasps of horror from jurors when he claimed it ‘must have been kids’ who held Sara down and burnt her with an iron while her legs were bound.
Prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones, KC, asked him: ‘How low will you stoop?’
Here is a timeline of events that led to Sara Sharif’s death and the trial of her father Urfan Sharif, stepmother Beinash Batool and uncle Faisal Malik:
On the stand, Sharif finally cracked under cross-examination admitting that he had regularly beaten Sara with a cricket bat for ‘no reason’ and killed her by hitting her with a metal pole.
Letters found after Sara’s death revealed her desperation to win over her tyrannical father, as she wrote, ‘I am sorry that I was rude. Please forgive me, I am so, so sorry.’
Sara wrote that Batool was the ‘best, caring and loving mother in the world’ and said of her father ‘I love you so much. Our family is the best in town, we spread love around the world.’
Sadly it could not be further from the truth.
Sara’s grandmother Sylwia Kurz said of Sharif and Batool: ‘There are not people; these are beasts.
‘I can’t understand how much Sara went through, how much pain she had to go through. She must have suffered so much. How is it possible to be such a degenerate?’
Ms Kurz did not attend the trial as the evidence was too painful to listen to.
‘We are going through hell here and I am mentally exhausted,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I could sit there and look at their faces. These are wounds that never heal and never will.’
One maternal uncle, who asked not to be named, said: ‘What matters is that they rot in prison.’
Rachael Wardell, Executive Director for Children, Families and Lifelong Learning at Surrey County Council, said: ‘Sara’s death is incredibly distressing and we share in the profound horror at the terrible details that have emerged during the trial.
‘We cannot begin to comprehend the suffering that poor Sara endured at the hands of members of her family who should have loved, protected, and cared for her.
‘The focus of the trial has been on the evidence needed to secure the convictions of those responsible for Sara’s death. This means that until the independent safeguarding review concludes, a complete picture cannot be understood or commented upon.
‘What is clear from the evidence we’ve heard in court is that the perpetrators went to extreme lengths to conceal the truth from everyone.
‘We are resolute in our commitment to protecting children, and we are determined to play a full and active part in the forthcoming review alongside partner agencies, to thoroughly understand the wider circumstances surrounding Sara’s tragic death.’
A Surrey Police spokesman said: ‘We will continue to work with our partner agencies, Surrey County Council and the NHS Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care Board, under the Surrey Safeguarding Children Partnership, to progress the review into the circumstances of Sara’s death.
‘The review will scrutinise decisions and actions taken by the agencies involved and as such, we are unable to provide any further comment which might pre-empt the outcome of that review.
‘No child should ever have to endure the brutal mistreatment, the appalling injuries and the extreme abuse that Sara was subjected to. We remain committed to working with our partner agencies to identify the lessons to be learned from this case and ensure these are swiftly acted upon.’
Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said: ‘Sara Sharif was killed by the people in her life that should have loved her the most – and they must now face the consequences of that terrible act.
‘Her death is a heartbreaking reminder of the profound weaknesses in our child protection system that, as a country, we have failed time and time again to correct. We have been here before – and each time we have said ‘never again’.
‘What haunts me the most about Sara’s death is that her father used the words ‘I legally punished my child’, believing this to be a defence to murder.
‘It is unthinkable that any parent or carer could hide behind our legal system to justify such cruelty – and yet, children living in England today have less protection from assault than adults.
‘The law needs to change. The outdated defence in assault law that permits ‘reasonable chastisement’ of children must be removed as a matter of urgency, through the Children’s Wellbeing Bill being introduced to Parliament imminently.’
She added: ‘Sara’s death must also bring about an immediate shift in how we protect children like her.
‘Schools, so often the place where vulnerable children are identified and protected, must be made the fourth statutory safeguarding partners with the police, social care and health services.
‘We need proper oversight of children being educated at home, through the long-promised register of children not in school and by requiring councils to sign off on home educating requests for some of the most vulnerable children.
‘This must go hand in hand with better data sharing by services and the introduction of a unique ID for every child.
‘There can be no doubt that Sara was failed in the starkest terms by the safety net of services around her.
‘Even before she was born, she was known to social care – and yet she fell off their radar so entirely that by the time she died, she was invisible to them all.
‘We can have no more reviews, no more strategies, no more debate. When we say ‘never again’, we have to mean it – let that be Sara’s legacy.’
Maria Neophytou, acting chief executive of the NSPCC, said: ‘Sara Sharif was repeatedly assaulted and tortured before being finally murdered by her father and stepmother in what was an absolutely shocking case of brutal and prolonged abuse. Her uncle was aware of the horrors she was being subjected to but did nothing to save her.
‘Our thoughts go out to all those who loved and cared for Sara in a life that was marked by so much pain and suffering.
‘What this little girl endured over several years raises crucial questions about what more could have been done to protect her and important issues regarding child safeguarding.
‘It is vital that the Child Safeguarding Practice Review identifies any ways in which Sara could have been better protected, in an effort to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future.
‘This terrible case has also highlighted the ambiguity of the current legal position in England around the physical punishment of children.
‘It is disturbing that Urfan Sharif believed – and told police – that he ‘did legally punish’ Sara for being naughty. Politicians at Westminster must move swiftly to abolish the defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ and give children the same protection from assault as adults.
‘Families, professionals, and individuals can also all work to protect children by reporting any concerns, no matter how small, to the local authorities, the police, or the NSPCC Helpline. If a child is in immediate danger, always call emergency services on 999.’