1 of 5 | Sara Sharif’s father, his partner and his brother were charged with her murder Friday, five weeks after she was found dead in family home near London. The three all face an additional charge of causing or allowing the death of a child. File photo courtesy Surrey Police.
British prosecutors Friday charged the father, stepmother and uncle of 10-year-old Sara Sharif with her murder, five weeks after she was found dead in the family’s abandoned home outside London.
The Crown Prosecution Service authorized the homicide charges against father Urfan Sharif, 41, his partner Beinash Batool, 29, and Urfan’s brother, Faisal Malik, 28, with an additional charge against each of the defendants of causing or allowing the death of a child, Surrey Police said in a news release. Advertisement
All three were remanded in police custody to appear before Guildford Magistrates Court on Friday.
They were arrested at London’s Gatwick Airport on Wednesday night after voluntarily flying home from Pakistan where they fled the day before police discovered Sara’s body on Aug. 10 in the family home in Woking, 30 miles southwest of the capital.
Sharif, Batool and their five other children, along with Sharif’s brother Faisal Malik, flew to Pakistan on Aug. 9. Urfan then called British emergency services from Pakistan the next day to inform them about Sara, sparking an international manhunt.
A post-mortem revealed Sara had sustained “multiple and extensive injuries” over her body, but was unable to discover the exact cause of death. Advertisement
Pakistani authorities had been tracking down the family following an Interpol alert at the request of British police, but the three are believed to have returned to Britain of their own accord.
A court in Pakistan on Tuesday ordered child protective services to remove Sara’s siblings, aged between one and 13, from the home of their grandfather in Jhelum, southeast of Islamabad, where they had been staying and bring them to a government-run children’s home.
