"it wasn't my intention to kill her, but I beat her up too much"
A court heard that Sara Sharif’s father brutally beat her to death because she was “naughty”.
On August 10, 2023, police rushed to the family home in Surrey.
Officers found Sara’s body lying under the covers in her bunk bed.
Beside her battered body was a note allegedly in Sharif’s handwriting which read:
“It’s me Urfan Sharif who killed my daughter by beating. I swear to God that my intention was not to kill her. But I lost it.
“I am running away because I am scared.”
At the Old Bailey, prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones KC said that Sharif and his family fled to Pakistan on August 9, leaving Sara’s body behind following a “brutal” campaign of violence lasting weeks.
They alerted authorities from Pakistan.
Mr Emlyn Jones said: “In that call, Urfan Sharif began by asking the operator to take down his address. It sounds like he is crying.
“The operator interrupted and said, ‘Take a deep breath and tell me what’s happened’.
“999 operators are used to hearing all kinds of dreadful things, but this one cannot have expected the answer he got to that question. Urfan Sharif told him, ‘I’ve killed my daughter’.
“He used an odd expression: ‘I legally punished her, and she died’.
“A little later, when asked for more detail, he added, ‘She was naughty’ and then, ‘I beat her up, it wasn’t my intention to kill her, but I beat her up too much’.”
Sharif, his wife Beinash Batool and his younger brother Faisal Malik were arrested in September 2023 at Gatwick Airport after getting off a flight from Dubai.
The trio were all living in the house at the time of the murder.
They were charged with Sara’s murder.
They were also charged with causing or allowing the death of a child.
Mr Emlyn Jones said the defendants were “pointing the finger at each other” and claiming one of the others was responsible.
Describing the scene that police found at the property, Mr Emlyn Jones said:
“In an upstairs bedroom, on a bottom bunk bed, the police found the body of a little girl, lying in bed, under the cover, as if asleep.
“But she was not asleep. She was dead.
“When Urfan Sharif said, in that call, ‘I beat her up’, he came nowhere near to describing the extent of the violence and physical abuse Sara had suffered; not just at the time of her death, but repeatedly, over time; she had been the victim of assault and physical abuse for weeks and weeks, at least.
“The doctors found dozens of separate injuries, externally and internally, when they examined Sara’s body.”
“She had suffered extensive bruising; burns; broken bones, old and new.
“So no, Sara had not just been beaten up. Her treatment, certainly in the last few weeks of her life, had been appalling; it had been brutal.”
Mr Emlyn Jones told jurors that Sharif now claims that his “apparent confessions were false” and that he only said those things to protect others.
Batool claimed “her husband was a violent disciplinarian, who regularly assaulted Sara”, but she was scared of her husband.
Meanwhile, Malik said that although he was living in the house, he was “entirely unaware of any abuse”.
The three defendants deny murder.
The trial is expected to go on until December 13, 2024.