the family is "tortured with the thought Zara’s death was preventable”.
An inquest heard that Zara Aleena’s family is “tortured” with the thought that her “death was preventable”.
In June 2022, Jordan McSweeney killed the 35-year-old law graduate as she walked home from a night out in Ilford, east London.
McSweeney was handed a life sentence with a minimum term of 38 years at the Old Bailey in December 2022 after admitting Zara’s murder and sexual assault.
Her aunt Farah Naz told the inquest a “crumbling justice system” had a part in her niece’s death.
McSweeney had been released from prison on licence on June 17, 2022, and, after breaching the conditions of his licence, a decision was made to recall him to prison on June 24, 2022, two days before he killed Zara.
Ms Naz said the family is “tortured with the thought Zara’s death was preventable”.
She stated that her niece’s murder highlighted “the crumbling justice system meant to protect us”.
Ms Naz said: “Since her death, we have been campaigning so that our daughters, sisters, friends can be safe and protected as Zara never was. This is Zara’s legacy.”
She told the jury of niece’s “sparkling eyes and curly jet black hair” and “glorious laughter”.
Ms Naz said Zara Aleena was a carer for her mother and grandmother, “the rock of our family” and it was the “proudest moment for all of us” when she was offered a job as a legal assistant at the Royal Courts of Justice.
She described her niece as “a carefree spirit with the most caring heart” and said she had worked to help resettle refugees in the UK.
Ms Naz said: “2022 was to be her year to live her wildest dreams.
“She wanted to buy her own home, find Mr Right and to have children. The future looked bright.”
Ms Naz said her niece “wasn’t just surviving, she was thriving”, adding:
“Zara walked everywhere and one night she walked home from an evening out with a friend, she was sexually assaulted and murdered. She was 35 years old.
“She believed that a woman should be allowed to walk home, and her dreams, her future was brutally taken.”
Coroner Nadia Persaud said the inquest’s purpose was to “consider the circumstance by which Zara came by her death, which will include whether any actions or omissions of state bodies contributed to her death”.
The jury was told that McSweeney was 29 at the time of the attack and had received his first custodial sentence at the age of 13, with much of his adult years spent in prison or in the community under licence.
Reading a statement from a consultant forensic pathologist, Ms Persaud said the cause of Zara’s death was blunt force head injury and neck compression.
The inquest is expected to last for four weeks.
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