Stepmother and uncle decline to give evidence in Sara Sharif murder trial
Lawyers for Beinash Batool and Faisal Malik indicated that neither would give evidence in their defence.
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Sara Sharif’s stepmother and uncle have declined to give evidence in their trial for the 10-year-old’s murder.
Over two weeks in the witness box, Sara’s father Urfan Sharif, 42, had blamed his wife Beinash Batool for his daughter’s death before taking “full responsibility” for it on the seventh day.
At the conclusion of his evidence, lawyers for Batool, 30, and Sara’s uncle Faisal Malik, 29, indicated that neither would give evidence in their defence.
On Monday, Mr Justice Cavanagh told jurors it meant that except for a few agreed facts, they would hear no more evidence in the case.
Sharif, Batool, and Malik are accused of being party to years-long abuse which culminated in Sara’s death last August.
Sara’s body was found in a bunk bed at the family home in Woking, Surrey, after Sharif called police on arrival in Islamabad, in Pakistan, the Old Bailey has heard.
Sharif had left a note confessing to killing Sara on a pillow next to her body and told police in his call that he beat her up “too much”.
Sara had suffered dozens of injuries, including multiple broken bones, burns, and human bite marks.
The defendants were detained on a plane minutes after it touched down at Gatwick airport last September 13.
During his evidence, Sharif admitted tying the girl up with packaging tape and hitting her with a cricket bat, metal pole and mobile phone, even whacking her in the stomach as she lay dying in Batool’s lap.
But he denied biting her on the arm and thigh, burning her with a domestic iron and boiling water and putting her head in a hood as he meted out punishments for “naughty” behaviour.
During his cross-examination, prosecutor William Emlyn Jones KC suggested that all the defendants were involved in the violence against Sara, which had become “normalised” in the household.
He asserted that some of the abuse would have required two people and by the time of her death, Sara had been forced to wear a nappy so she could be kept tied up for longer.
He said: “That’s how bad it got, Mr Sharif. She’s taped up, she soils herself, you have to come home and you beat her for soiling herself. It’s disgraceful. The nappies were a solution for restraint.”
Mr Emlyn Jones also asked if Batool’s attitude towards Sara was coloured by the fact she was not her child.
The prosecutor said: “If Sara was sick, vomited herself, ‘I’m not cleaning her up’, Batool would say, ‘it’s your problem, Urfan’.
“So you had to do it and that made you furious didn’t it, so you would beat her for it.”
Sharif replied: “I did a few times.”
Sharif, Batool and Malik, formerly of Hammond Road, Woking, deny murder and causing or allowing Sara’s death.
On Monday, Mr Justice Cavanagh sent the jury away until Wednesday morning, saying he would give them directions in law before barristers began their closing speeches.