A few days ago, I posted the tragic tale of a Muslim woman who’s family invited men to the family home to rape her.
Today, I post this tragic tale of a Muslim woman whose family did nothing while her husband battered her to death.
A family who stood by as a husband systematically battered to death his young bride through an arranged marriage have been found guilty of failing to help her in the weeks before she died.
Sabia Rani, 19, suffered horrendous injuries at the hands of new husband Shazad Khan, 25, but her plight was ignored by his other relatives who shared their home in Leeds.
Khan was convicted for the teenager’s murder a year ago after she was discovered with bruising to 90 per cent of her body and up to 15 broken ribs.
Khan’s mother Phullan Bibi, 52, his two sisters Uzma Khan, 23, and 28-year-old Nazia Naureen, and Naureen’s husband Majid Hussain, also 28, lived with the couple in Oakwood Grange, Roundhay.
Leeds Crown Court was told during their three-week trial for allowing the death of a vulnerable adult that they had tried to blame her injuries on evil spirits and curses.
It took the jury nine hours of deliberation to come back with four unanimous guilty verdicts.
As they were read out in court, the group screamed and thumped the dock. Khan’s sisters started wailing and hugging each other before screaming: “Not guilty, not guilty.”
His mother stood up and started crying and had to be restrained by officers after repeatedly banging both hands down on the dock.
Ms Rani only arrived in England five months before her death. She had been brought up in rural Pakistan and did not speak English.
The jury was told she had not been allowed out of the house she shared with her husband and his family without a chaperone.
They also heard that the teenager would have been in severe pain and very ill in the weeks up to her death in May 2006.
After her death, pathologist Christopher Milroy described her injuries as being similar to those suffered by someone in a serious road accident.
Prosecutor Simon Myerson QC said the defendants tried to blame them on evil spirits and curses.
Mr Myerson told the court that each defendant must have known Ms Rani was in pain and that Khan was the cause of it.
Professor Archibald Malcolm, a leading expert on bone fractures, who gave evidence during the trial, attributed the injuries her ribs to “hard kicks, stamps or very hard punches”.
The pathologist deduced there were three “episodes” of fracturing, one around three weeks before her dath, one about two weeks before and the other around 12 hours of less.
At the time of Khan’s murder conviction last year, West Yorkshire Police had already taken the first steps towards charging the family members.
After today’s verdicts, the Crown Prosecution Service revealed that the defendants were some of the first people in the country to be convicted of allowing the death of a vulnerable adult.
Malcolm Taylor, of CPS West Yorkshire’s Complex Casework Unit, said: “Sabia Rani was the victim of horrific violence at the hands of her husband whilst her family, as the jury found, chose to do nothing to help her.
“This is the first case in West Yorkshire and one of the very first cases in the whole of England and Wales where the provisions of the Domestic Violence Crime and Victims Act 2004 have been used after the death of a ‘vulnerable adult’.”
He added: “The message must be that if families or other people with a duty to look after those who need protection deliberately choose not to do so, their neglect will not be ignored by the law enforcement agencies, and prosecution will follow.”
By the way, notice how both of these stories took place in England.
I hope the English are paying attention, because this might just be a prelude to their future.
