The family of Sara Sharif have had their appeal bids rejected, after they were sentenced to life for the brutal torture and murder of the schoolgirl.
Her father Urfan Sharif and stepmother Beinash Batool were sentenced to 40 years and 31 years respectively, after the 10-year-old girl was repeatedly battered, scalded with water, burnt and beaten with a cricket bat.
Her uncle, Faisal Malik, was found guilty of causing or allowing her death, after he resided at the family home in Woking, Surrey, in the months leading up to her murder in August 2023.
All three sought to challenge their sentences at the Court of Appeal, while the Solicitor General had also referred Sharif’s sentence as “unduly lenient”, which was heard at the same time.
In a decision on Thursday, the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr, sitting with Mr Justice Soole and Mr Justice Goose, declined to alter the sentences.
The judge also said that Sharif would not be given a whole life order, saying it was a sentence of “last resort for cases of the most extreme gravity”.
She said: “We are not persuaded that anything less than a whole life order was unduly lenient.”
Speaking on behalf of the Solicitor General, Tom Little KC described it as a “truly awful case of murder of a child” and argued: “In short we say when one considers the extent, duration and nature of the offending, this case does cross that threshold of being such a rare case that a whole life order would be appropriate.”
Sara was found dead in a bunkbed at the family home during the early hours of 10 August, after her father called Surrey Police after fleeing to Pakistan.
She had suffered 71 “fresh” injuries, including 25 broken bones, iron burns on her bottom, scalding marks to her feet, and human bites.
Within hours of Sara’s death, Sharif and Batool had booked flights to Islamabad for the whole family, including her siblings, with an international manhunt launched.
The defendants returned to the UK on September 13 2023, leaving the children behind, and were detained within minutes of a flight touching down at Gatwick airport.
In a televised sentencing at the Old Bailey in December, Mr Justice Cavanagh said Sara’s death “was the culmination of years of neglect, frequent assaults and what can only be described as torture”, mainly at the hands of Sharif.
Mr Little continued: “The violence meted out to Sara was premeditated and repeated again and again even if the murder itself was not.”
The barrister told the court in London that her family caused “stress, pain and trauma” to the schoolgirl who began to vomit food or soil herself as a response to the abuse.
It emerged during the trial that Sara had endured years of horrific abuse at the hands of her relatives, which included frequent punishments for minor misbehaviours.
Trapped in the family home in Woking, she was the victim of repeated beatings and scaldings, forced to leave school and carry out laundry chores for her stepmother while wearing a hijab to obscure her growing number of bruises and wounds.
Despite the concerns of neighbours who overheard screaming and crying, and the questions raised by her primary school teachers as to the reason behind her injuries, social services were unaware of the full scale of the brutality the young girl was facing.
Naeem Mian KC, for Sharif, said that a whole life order would not be the appropriate sentence in this case.
He said: “We say, without hesitation, this is not one of those exceptional cases.”
Speaking on behalf of Batool, Caroline Carberry KC stressed that Sara’s stepmother was the “secondary party”, who only began to actively participate in the abuse during the final months.
She also added that there had been a number of mitigating factors, which had being a victim of honour-based abuse herself, being isolated and depressed upon meeting Sharif, and had expressed concern to her sisters over the violence taking place in the household.
