Five weeks before she was murdered, 35-year-old Zara Aleena started work at the Royal Courts of Justice. On her first day, she sent a brightly smiling selfie to her friends and family, saying she couldn’t believe she was actually there. It was an administrative role that took her one step closer to her lifelong dream of being a lawyer; something she had pursued doggedly even as her studies were interrupted by caring responsibilities and financial concerns. After passing the solicitors’ exams with distinction and landing this new job, Aleena felt a new stage of her life was beginning. Her aunt Farah Naz told her: “Soon, Zara, you are going to be a formidable force.”
On the evening of 26 June 2022, Aleena met a friend at a local pub, the Great Spoon of Ilford. They had dinner and a drink there before moving on to a bar, where Aleena drank water. Around 2am, they left. The friend got in a cab, but Aleena walked; she was close to home and it was a warm evening. When her other aunt, Smaira Naz, imagines her walking that night, she thinks of how Aleena always had a spring in her step. “She had this bounce when she walked – it was lovely, so much energy,” she says. “Walking made her feel free.”
Ilford is a bustling, diverse area on the eastern edge of London. Aleena was on Cranbrook Road, a well-lit residential street about 10 minutes’ walk from her home, when she crossed paths with a 29-year-old man called Jordan McSweeney, who had recently been released from prison. By coincidence, he had also been in the Great Spoon of Ilford earlier in the evening, but was ejected after harassing a female bartender. Before encountering Aleena, CCTV footage shows him staggering around the streets of Ilford, following different women. One woman, noticing he was trailing her, dived into a supermarket to hide. He marched up and down the aisles looking for her, before waiting outside. After leaving the shop, she broke into a desperate run when she saw he was still there. Later, McSweeney went into a chicken shop, staring at a female customer with his hands down his trousers, before following her, too. She lost him. He followed a third woman along the street. Two men across the road appeared to notice what he was doing, but did not intervene, and the woman went out of their line of vision when she turned off the road with McSweeney close behind her. When she noticed him, he overtook her, pretending to enter a house but in fact hiding in a driveway, lying in wait. Fortunately, the woman went into her house before she reached him. Wandering back on to Cranbrook Road, McSweeney spotted Aleena and began to follow her. As the prosecution lawyer later said: “She did not stand a chance of survival.”
Before Aleena noticed him, he grabbed her from behind with one arm over her mouth and the other round her neck. He dragged her into a driveway and sexually assaulted her, before stamping on her several times – with, in the words of the prosecution, “almost unimaginable force” – and leaving her for dead. The entire brutal assault took nine minutes. Soon afterwards, Aleena was found by members of the public, who attempted to administer first aid as they waited for an ambulance. Emergency services arrived at about 2.45am, but it was too late to save her. She died in hospital at 9.58am on Sunday.
Around 11am, police officers knocked on the door of Aleena’s grandmother, a short distance from Cranbrook Road. Aleena was a carer for her mother and grandmother, and had a bedroom in each house, walking the half-hour between the two addresses several times a day. The police asked her grandmother, Rashda Parveen, to identify Aleena from a still from the pub’s CCTV. When Parveen confirmed it was her, police explained what had happened. Aleena’s uncle, Kasim Ali, called the rest of the family. Farah Naz was at home in Portugal when she heard. In a blur, she broke the news to her own children before flying back to London. “We were all in shock, numb, disbelieving,” she says.
The family is close-knit and interconnected. Aleena’s grandparents migrated to Britain from Pakistan in 1968 and eventually had five children. Aleena was their first grandchild; her mother had become a single parent at 22. The family raised Aleena together. “We didn’t have much, growing up, but we always valued education and we just thought: Zara is going to have it all,” Farah Naz remembers. “And so she had it all – museums, galleries, travel. She was the family darling.” The horror of her death is difficult to reconcile: “It’s as if a thief came into our family home and took the heart of it.”
Everyone was reeling; struggling to eat, sleep or talk about the murder, yet unable to think of anything else. But there was so much to do. Naz, a therapist who has worked in women’s organisations, dealt with the media and met with police. Even through their shock and grief, the family knew they wanted to control the narrative and protect Aleena from victim-blaming. Just three days after her death, they put out a remarkable statement. “She was fierce: she didn’t just survive, she thrived. She walked everywhere. She put her party shoes in a bag and donned her trainers. She walked. Zara believed that a woman should be able to walk home.”
A week after Aleena’s death, hundreds of people gathered on Cranbrook Road, dressed in white. They were there to walk Aleena home. Addressing the crowd, Anjum Mouj, chair of the London Black Women’s Project, said: “It’s 2 July, nearly 60 women have died this year. Shame on our society, shame on our political leaders.” Carrying roses, the crowd silently walked the short distance to Aleena’s house. “We needed to do something before we became paralysed with grief,” Naz says. “I’m not going to get closure, but the community held us in their arms that day as if to remind us not to give up on humanity.”
Mouj, who helped organise the vigil, has known the family for more than 30 years. When I speak with her in November, she is tearful. “There is no degree of separation, no sense that one thing is my work and one thing is my life. It sounds trite, but Zara cannot have died without something profound changing.”
***
Two weeks after Aleena’s death, I sit down with Farah Naz to talk for the first time. She is in her 50s and bears a striking resemblance to her niece. “I feel like a ghost, like I’m not really here,” she tells me. “It’s like being stuck in a horror film.” She is remarkably composed, but explains that this is because she is in a state of trauma and dissociation. Despite this, she feels an urgent need to speak out; an obligation to Aleena and an urge to create meaning from this senseless tragedy. For years, Aleena had been the family organiser – the person who stepped in during a crisis, who made a formal complaint when a postman shouted at her grandmother, who cleaned up the house when her aunt Smaira was burgled. “If it had been me who was murdered, right now it would be Zara sitting in front of you,” Naz says. “She was a lioness. She was protective of women’s rights, and she always wanted to fight for justice. Zara would be screaming from the rooftops.”
Ever since the murder of Sarah Everard by police officer Wayne Couzens in March 2021, there has been a particular media focus on women killed by strangers. The outpouring of public rage and grief that followed the Everard killing changed the national conversation and appeared to be a genuine moment of reckoning. “It put a spotlight on women’s safety in public spaces,” says Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Woman campaign. “There always seems to be a misplaced responsibility on women not to be attacked, even though we’re doing this invisible safety work – keys in hand, sharing locations – all the time.” (A WhatsApp message on Aleena’s phone, sent by her friend after she left the bar read, “Are you home hon?”) While this type of crime is actually quite rare – it is far more common for a woman to be murdered by a current or ex-partner – these cases have become symbolic of broader despair about women’s safety and a political and policing culture that does not appear to take it seriously. “Why are there two women a week being murdered in the UK?” Naz asks. “This is about power, control and misogyny. Zara had a right to be safe.”
In July 2021, after the outcry over Everard’s murder, Priti Patel, then home secretary, said that “there must be a change”, adding that she was speaking “not just as home secretary, but as a woman”. The government pledged a legal review into gaps in existing law and how a specific offence of public sexual harassment could address those (a bill criminalising street harassment is making its way through the Commons); an information campaign targeting perpetrators of violence against women; a £5m “safety of women and night fund”; more street lighting and more CCTV. Campaigners argue that these solutions merely scratch the surface. “This approach doesn’t address the root problem: the unacceptable attitudes and behaviours that underpin women’s inequality,” Simon says. There has been little investment in the kind of long-term, major public education campaign that could create a wholesale shift in attitudes to women. And when it comes to the criminal justice system, the problems are deeply ingrained. “New laws could have a useful effect on behaviour, but we already have a whole raft of laws which are just not being implemented at all,” says Harriet Wistrich, director of the Centre for Women’s Justice. Rape convictions are so low that the victims’ commissioner said in 2020 that the offence is effectively “decriminalised”. (In 2021, just 1.6% of reported rape cases led to a charge.) Disturbing reports of misogyny in the police force proliferate. In 2021, the inspectorate of probation found that checks on sexual offenders and domestic violence perpetrators going back into the community were “nowhere near effective enough”. All the while, the list of women murdered by violent men grows. “The tragedy is that the only time you see a really good, effective investigation is when there’s a murder, and then police put in the resources and do a good job,” Wistrich says. “But on the lesser offences that often lead to an escalation, they’re failing.”
Aleena often discussed these issues with her friend Kareece Peters. The two met in secondary school and as adults were still in and out of each other’s houses, speaking on the phone most days. They sent each other links to news articles and got heated on the subject of women’s safety and victim-blaming. “We both said the same thing – it’s such shit that you can take all these precautions and they’ll still find another thing to say you did wrong,” Peters says. When another tragic case of a woman’s death hit the news, they’d text each other in weary anger: “Here we go again.” Aleena was keenly aware of the forces stacked against women, Peters remembers: “Zara would say, ‘When are we going to address the people who feel entitled to our time and space? It feels like we’re going backwards.’”
The day after the murder, police arrested McSweeney at the caravan where he was staying with a friend, in a funfair at Valentines Park, just off Cranbrook Road. They had identified him from the bloody fingerprints he left near the site of the attack and then traced his location using CCTV. He was known to police: he had 28 convictions for 69 previous offences, including assaults on police and civilians, theft and racially aggravated harassment. He had been released from prison on 17 June, nine days before the murder. By the time he targeted Aleena, he should not have been free: he’d been recalled to prison two days earlier after failing to show up for meetings with probation officers, but police had failed to track him down. (This is the subject of a probation inspectorate inquiry, expected to publish results this month.) “What I feel with Zara’s case really keenly is those missed opportunities,” Simon says. “There were so many state failings, so many missed points, where police or other agencies could have responded better to this dangerous man.”
The criminal justice system has been decimated in recent years: legal aid has been cut to the point where it is barely functional, courts are plagued by delays, prisons are over-full and targeted rehabilitative services almost nonexistent. All of this has an effect. “The criminal justice system isn’t really functioning,” Wistrich says. “And agencies exist in a culture of misogyny. We have police officers who carry those views, or don’t understand the dynamics of male violence towards women. We have probation officers who don’t understand what behaviour represents danger towards women, and a prison and parole system not effectively identifying risk.”
Farah Naz speaks with quiet fury about this. “Where are the targeted early-intervention programmes for offenders? Why aren’t potentially violent men identified early?” She goes over and over McSweeney’s movements on the night of the murder. Why had no one stepped in? She worries about the loss of trust in police and wonders how bystanders could be encouraged to intervene if they see concerning behaviour. “Women have a right not to be hurt. But they think it’s a norm they have to accept.”
The what-ifs are a torment. What if one of the many people who saw McSweeney harassing women that night had called the police? What if someone in one of the houses had responded to Aleena’s screams and intervened? What if the passersby who found her struggling to breathe had turned on to the road earlier? Would she still be here?
***
Aleena laughed easily and often. Her aunt Smaira Naz lived nearby and Aleena visited several times a week. When she was revising for her solicitors’ exams, she asked her aunt to help her practise role-plays, but they always ended up collapsing into giggles. “Zara could talk for England,” Peters says. For years Aleena worked in the local Tie Rack and Peters would pop in to see her for 20 minutes and end up staying hours as Aleena chattered away, serving customers at the same time. She knew everyone in the area, from teenagers to octogenarians, always friendly and offering to help her neighbours out. Her friend Sherit Nair lives between her mother and grandmother’s homes, so Aleena often stopped off on the way. Sometimes he wouldn’t see her for the first hour as she caught up with his mum and sisters. “She could talk for hours, but she was a great listener, too,” he says. “Zara was so vibrant and distinctive. People remembered her even if they met her briefly. She just stood out.” She was a cat lover, sometimes spending her own money to take strays to the vet. She looked after some of these at home, or convinced neighbours to take them in. “The word I’d use to describe her is ‘radiant’,” her friend Sanjay Nair says. “She was so positive, it rubbed off on you. If you had a bad day, you knew talking to Zara would pick you up. She just made you feel happy.”
Today, the streets are a physical geography of loss for her friends. Leaving her house, Peters sees the spot where she’d meet Aleena to walk to the tube together; the corner where Aleena would turn off to walk home. Sherit Nair is a tube driver and had promised Aleena that if he ever spotted her on the platform coming home from work, she could hop into the driver’s carriage. He still instinctively looks for her.
“She was just such a darling,” Smaira Naz says. She worried her niece was taking on too much; for years she worked in retail alongside her studies, and even after starting at the Royal Courts of Justice carried on volunteering as a caseworker to resettle refugees in the UK. Alongside this, she cared for her mother and grandmother, making sure they had food, medications and company. “She never felt it was a burden,” Nair says. “She took great pride in it and was always trying to think of ways to brighten their days.” If a friend needed a babysitter, a shoulder to cry on or a listening ear, they called Aleena. “She lived life to the absolute max,” Sanjay Nair says. “I’m not saying it because she’s gone, but she was the kindest person I ever met.” She was straight-talking, too; the friend you could always rely on to be honest. “She was fierce, and she didn’t take any shit from anyone,” Farah Naz says.
Aleena made people feel seen. Peters works as a jewellery designer and was surprised when Aleena gave her a mug with a lid attached to it, so she could drink tea in her studio without it getting dusty. “She was like that – you’d forgotten you’d said something, then she’d respond.” Even now, her grandmother is still finding gifts Aleena had bought for her friends and relatives, wrapped ready for far-off birthdays or Christmases.
In the aftermath of her death, everyone in the family shut down in one way or another. Farah Naz struggled when people said they were sorry for her loss. “I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, because I’m not going through what she went through,” she says. “She’s lost everything she worked for, everything she was, everything she was yet to be. It just got taken away.”
***
On 28 August, two months after Aleena’s death, around 100 people gather outside Ilford town hall for a protest march in her memory organised by a local campaign group called Walk It Out. It is a disparate group: friends and family of Aleena, campaigners, local councillors and members of the public. Farah Naz is here, too, looking tired. It is a sunny day, and cardboard placards are propped up against the steps of the town hall bearing the names of women – Zara Aleena; Sabina Nessa, who was murdered by a stranger as she walked through a park to meet a friend; Everard – and slogans such as “enough is enough”.
The march goes down Ilford high street, past the station, Indian takeaways, estate agents and pound shops. Organisers hold a megaphone at the front, shouting repeatedly: “Say her name.” The marchers call back: “Zara Aleena”. I walk with Peters and Nonny, another school friend of Aleena’s. They’re wearing T-shirts printed with a photo of them on a night out with her. Neither has attended a protest before. “It’s really difficult to keep saying her name,” Nonny says, quietly.
We reach Cranbrook Road and stop opposite the driveway where Aleena was killed. A laminated photograph of her and a few bunches of flowers still sit on the pavement. It is a wide road with large houses, dotted with lamp-posts, with buses and cars going up and down. I can see how it would feel like a safe road to walk on at night. In a matter-of-fact tone, Farah Naz points out the driveway and the residential CCTV camera directly above the spot where Aleena was attacked. The entire incident was recorded. Naz says it was a hot night and windows would have been open, so people must have heard her screaming. Later, she tells me it is important for her to directly confront this horror. “I have to bear witness to what she went through.”
Afterwards Peters tells me that she did not have an easy day. Strangers used their T-shirts as an opening, sharing details they’d read about McSweeney and the murder. This information was difficult to hear. “I wished that hadn’t been unloaded to us,” she says. “People forget they’re talking about a real person. She had a life, she had a family, she had friends.”
As the months passed and police built their case, the family grappled with their grief. Farah Naz tried to think about how to bring good out of this tragedy and create a legacy for Aleena. She held a dizzying array of meetings – with women’s rights groups, the London mayor’s office, the victims’ commissioner and others. “I’ve been learning a hell of a lot about the judicial system, and how to be a victim,” she tells me in October. She has been surprised at how Eurocentric some services are; only Aleena’s mother qualified for victim support, and Naz felt she constantly had to explain her closeness to her niece, although these close relationships are commonplace in south Asian families. She sought private therapeutic treatment for her own trauma.
But every now and then, in a meeting with an official or a campaigner, Naz caught someone giving her a look of concern and wondered: am I coming across more traumatised than I think I am? When this happened at one meeting in late November, Naz’s professional expertise as a therapist kicked in. “I suddenly realised that, somewhere in my brain, I thought this was still happening. I’m talking to people with this urgency, and the subtext is: ‘Can you go and save her? Can you stop this right now? Please, can you stop this?’ I was coming from a place of trauma, and I thought I was out of it.”
***
For weeks, McSweeney refused to leave his cell to enter a plea. When I say how stressful that must be, Naz shrugs. “It’s not like we’re ever out of suffering. I am thinking about Zara all the time.” In late November, McSweeney finally pleads guilty. This means the family is spared the protracted process of a trial. The evidence is overwhelming: CCTV footage not only of the sexual assault and murder, but of McSweeney pursuing other women; bloody clothes and shoes found near his caravan; his fingerprint in blood on the wall where she was killed.
The sentencing hearing takes place on 14 December at the Old Bailey. It is an icy, cold day, but women’s groups and friends are gathered outside with placards. The public gallery is full of loved ones, the press gallery packed with the national media. Aleena’s mother, who has been struggling in the aftermath of her daughter’s death, could not make it. But Farah and Smaira Naz walk in with their brother, Kasim Ali, and Aleena’s grandmother. Only one spot in the room remains empty: the dock. McSweeney has refused to attend. His barrister tells the court that he did not want to see the CCTV footage and “relive that night”. (“Why does he have that right?” Naz asks me the next day. “We wanted to watch him watch the video, look at him when we gave our impact statements. He should have been made to look at us.”)
The prosecution gives a detailed account of McSweeney’s movements in the hours before the murder. Perhaps the most chilling thing about the CCTV footage of him pursuing women is how familiar it is; most women have experienced the cold fear of realising someone is staring or walking too close behind. Many will have stepped into a shop to lose someone, or asked a group of strangers if they can walk with them because a man is behaving threateningly. No one stepped in to help the women who were being followed that night, and none of the women or the witnesses reported it to the police. Sitting in the public gallery, Sherit Nair is tense, watching the repeated failures to intervene. “Men are the problem here and need to be the solution in calling out bad behaviour,” he tells me afterwards.
Aleena’s family leaves the room as CCTV footage of the attack is played, but Farah Naz returns, determined to bear witness. There is absolute silence in the courtroom as the prosecutor describes the brutal violence of the assault. Sanjay Nair sits in the public gallery and weeps. “I wish I could take that pain myself, so she didn’t have to,” he says. Every day since the murder, he says, he has been unable to stop replaying it in his head. The footage shows that after stamping on Aleena and leaving her for dead, McSweeney returned and took her phone, throwing it over a wall, presumably to prevent her calling for help. When he was arrested and questioned about the murder, he yawned loudly and told police that they were boring him.
In the courtroom that afternoon, Naz appears in the witness stand to deliver her victim impact statement. “We are trapped in a constant loop of torturous images, nightmares. We are stuck in time – sometimes we die with her, sometimes we are murdered and sometimes we are trying to save her with our hands tied,” she says. Her voice trembles with emotion, but she carries on: “How do we continue to believe in a society that breeds such violence towards women, how do we continue to have faith in systems that failed to protect her, to live in a community that didn’t respond to her screams?”
When Naz finishes, Aleena’s grandmother speaks. Her voice shakes as she tearfully describes how Aleena was the light of her life. She concludes by quoting from an Urdu poem: “Thief of my peace, may you never know peace. May God never give you peace.” Her broken sobs echo around the silent courtroom as she walks slowly back to her seat.
The judge sentences McSweeney to life in prison, with a minimum term of 38 years. He is not present for her sentencing remarks; once again, he refuses to leave his cell. The judge describes Aleena as “talented, intelligent, spirited and kind”, someone who “was simply living her life in what most Londoners think of as the best city in the world. She did nothing wrong.” This echoed the concluding remarks of the prosecuting barrister (“Zara Aleena had every right to walk home. She had every right to expect to do so safely”) and earlier comments of the senior investigating officer (“She had every right to be there”).
The substantial minimum sentence was a relief for Aleena’s family, but nothing can provide comfort. “The only way for us to survive is to campaign for Zara’s name to live on through change in society,” Naz says. She has stopped trying to find the solutions for ending violence against women and instead wants to use her family’s story to ask questions: how can the criminal justice system work better to identify killers and sexual offenders? What practical steps can be taken to end misogyny? “This cannot be seen as an unavoidable inevitability,” she says.
Aleena would have turned 36 on 9 December, five days before the sentencing. A small group of her family and friends gathered at a local park to plant a cherry tree and place a plaque on a bench in her memory. It reads: “An angel put on Earth. She touched the hearts of everyone around her. Gone too soon.”
