Sara Sharif’s father, Urfan Sharif, stepmother Beinash Batool and uncle Faisal Malik fled to Pakistan with other children after Sara died at the family home in Woking, Surrey
Sara Sharif’s callous dad, stepmother and uncle hid in corn fields during their desperate four-week bid to escape justice following her murder, it has emerged.
Urfan Sharif and the girl’s stepmother Beinash Batool were found guilty of murder on Wednesday at the Old Bailey after a jury deliberated for nine hours and 46 minutes. The pair, and Faisal Malik, who was convicted of causing or allowing his niece’s death, fled to Pakistan where police eventually used “hard tactics” to find them.
An officer there said the force received an Interpol request “to search and locate the suspects” after Sharif, 42, called police when he arrived in Islamabad and confessed he had beaten Sara up “too much”.
Around 17 or 18 members of the wider family were interrogated and officers went undercover to get information about Sara’s whereabouts, it has now emerged. However, the family hid in corn fields while police carried out their search across eastern Pakistan.
Officers raided the home of Rasikh Munir, a relative of Urfan Sharif’s, several times and, though he told the BBC he hid Sara’s family for weeks during the international police hunt, the three fugitives had taken cover in the corn fields.
Pressed on whether he felt he had done anything wrong, Mr Munir told the BBC: “I helped Urfan and the young children. If I hadn’t helped them, they would have been completely helpless. I helped them to look after the kids, I felt sympathy for them.
“They were my people. Had I not stood by them and something bad had happened to them who would have been responsible for them?”
The defendants returned to the UK on September 13, 2023 – leaving behind the children who had travelled with them – and were detained within minutes of a flight touching down at Gatwick Airport. They will now be sentenced on Tuesday.
Nasir Mehmood Bajwa, the district police officer (DPO) for Jhelum in Pakistan, told the Daily Mail: “They (Sharif and Batool) murdered a girl, so we had to do more for the safety of the children. We employed hard tactics to ensure their safety.”
Imran Hussain, one of the officers in Pakistan, told the paper they went undercover, and he went to a salon near the Sharif family home and started asking questions. He said: “We decided to use spies, people in civilian clothes. For that I went myself in plain clothes, on a motorbike.
