Sara Sharif's father denies stripping her dead body naked and jetwashing it in back garden
15 November 2024, 20:31 | Updated: 15 November 2024, 20:33
Some readers may find the following details distressing
The father of Sara Sharif has been accused of stripping naked her dead body and jetwashing it as he and his relatives prepared to flee to Pakistan.
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Urfan Sharif, 42, Sara's stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, and uncle Faisal Malik, 29, are on trial at the Old Bailey accused of her murder after a campaign of abuse.
The 10-year-old was found dead under a blanket at her home in Woking, Surrey, in August last year.
Sara had suffered dozens of injuries, including bruises, burns, broken bones and bite marks in the weeks leading up to her death, the jury was told.
Today in court, the taxi driver admitted abusing his daughter but said he did not powerwash her after her death.
Sara was wearing clean clothes when police found her body in a bunkbed.
Officer found Sara's soiled leggings and nappy discarded in the garden near a jetwash with packaging tape and hoods in the bin, jurors were told.
Police visited the house on Hammond Road, after her dad "confessed" to killing her in a 999 phonecall made from Pakistan.
Urfan Sharif arrested at Gatwick airport
Sharif has admitted binding Sara with the tape and beating her with a pole, cricket bat and mobile phone - and smacking her in the stomach as she lay dying in Batool's lap.
But he has 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.
On Friday, prosecutor William Emlyn Jones KC suggested all three defendants were involved, despite Sharif's claim that he took "full responsibility" for Sara's death.
Read more: Sara Sharif was punished because she had a ‘jinn in her’, stepmother claimed
On the defendant's actions after her death, he said: "You are all in this together. A problem you caused together, you all have to run away together.
"You were all worried about yourselves, all three of you were thinking about yourselves and getting away with it."
On the same night as Sara's death, Batool was on the phone to a travel agent arranging flights to Pakistan for the next day, the court heard.
Replaying the call, Mr Emlyn Jones said it was "brutal" that both she and Sharif sounded so "calm" as Sara's body was upstairs.
Mr Emlyn Jones suggested the evidence showed she was then taken into the garden, stripped of her dirty leggings and nappy and cleaned.
He asked: "She wasn't in the garden? You haven't taken her to the shed? You had a lot to do to tidy up, the house was left immaculately tidy and the bin was full of packing tape, various hoods. And the body of Sara was cleaned, wasn't it?
"She wasn't in the clothes she died in when you left the house, so she had been cleaned and washed?
"There was a jetwash out in the garden with her dirty clothes and the rest of the rubbish. Those are the leggings Sara died in, entwined with a filthy nappy, bundled up with two towels, soaking wet."
Sharif had told jurors he only cleaned Sara's head and did not remove her clothes.
Mr Emlyn Jones continued: "Somebody did get her out of her clothes, somebody did wash her. Did he do it - Faisal?"
The defendant replied: "No sir, she wasn't washed."
The prosecutor queried how Malik's McDonald's work uniform came to be thrown in the bin outside along with packaging tape and hoods placed on top.
Sharif replied: "I don't know, sir."
Mr Emlyn Jones said: "We can take it, Mr Sharif, that until the moment comes the three of you decide you are going to run away to Pakistan, Mr Malik needs his McDonald's uniform. And then everything changes."
Sharif denied anything was thrown away on the night Sara died.
Mr Emlyn Jones said: "When you left for Pakistan you had no plan to come back. Your plan was to go away so you could get away with what you had done."
Sharif insisted that he did come back to the UK, but the prosecutor asserted that was only because of pressure exerted on the family in Pakistan.
The murder-accused trio flew back to the UK on a flight from Dubai to Gatwick Airport on 13 September.
Sara Sharif relatives arrested on plane at Gatwick Airport
Re-examining, Sharif's lawyer Naeem Mian KC asked him about the injuries he did not take responsibility for - the burns, bites and use of a hood.
Weeping, Sharif denied doing this, but said: "I take responsibility for everything that happened to my daughter.
"I am her father, I didn't do what I should have done."
The defendants, formerly of Hammond Road, Woking, have denied murder and causing or allowing the death of a child between December 16 2022 and August 9 2023.
The trial was adjourned until noon on Monday.
