Sara Sharif trial – live: Case to resume on Wednesday with neighbours set to give evidence

Ten-year-old Sara Sharif died after an alleged “campaign of abuse” in the home she shared with her father, stepmother and uncle.

Taxi driver Urfan Sharif, 42, is on trial at the Old Bailey accused of his daughter’s murder alongside Sara’s stepmother, Beinash Batool, 30, and uncle, Faisal Malik, 29.

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On Thursday, the court was shown X-rays of some of Sara’s injuries, including fractures in the fingers of her left hand and one in the u-shaped hyoid bone in her neck.

A pathologist, bone specialist Professor Anthony Freemont, told the court he had concluded the break in her neck had been caused “within the setting of neck compression” of which “the most common cause of these types of fractures is manual strangulation”.

He said that, according to his analysis, this injury was between six to 12 weeks old at the time of Sara’s death.

Professor Freemont said the two fractures in the girl’s fingers had occurred between 12 and 18 days before her death, based on his analysis of the stage of healing the injuries were at.

Of the injuries he examined, Professor Freemont said: “If you find fractures of different ages and different bones, there is a high likelihood they are non-accidental injuries.”

The pathologist went on to say that the bone marrow he examined from Sara’s body showed changes which could have been caused by starvation or “the rapid removal of all food”.

The previous day, jurors heard that another pathologist who carried out a post-mortem examination on Sara’s body gave the girl’s cause of death as “complications arising from multiple injuries and neglect”.

Taxi driver Urfan Sharif, 42, is on trial at the Old Bailey accused of his 10-year-old daughter’s murder alongside Sara’s stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, and uncle, Faisal Malik, 29. All three deny murder and the defence is yet to mount its case.

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Over the last week, jurors at the Old Bailey have heard harrowing details of a “campaign of abuse” allegedly inflicted upon Sara Sharif in the months before she died.

She was discovered dead in a bed at the family home on Hammond Road in Woking, after her father Urfan Sharif called Surrey Police during the early hours of 10 August to report he had “beat her” as she was being “naughty”, and that she had died.

Upon finding her body, police also found a handwritten note by Sharif in which he confessed to killing her, and said that he was “running away” as he was scared.

A post-mortem examination found a catalogue of injuries across the 10-year-old, including more than 70 separate injuries, a traumatic brain injury, 25 fractures, a burn from an iron and scalding from hot water. She was also found with six suspected human bite marks.

Jurors heard that neighbours who resided next to the family had heard screaming and shouting coming from the property, and traces of Sara’s blood were discovered on items such as a cricket bat.

Her father, her stepmother Beinash Batool and her uncle Faisal Malik have all denied her murder.

Sara Sharif suffered 25 unexplained fractures in multiple locations across her body, as well as an “extremely rare” neck injury that a radiologist had never seen before in a child, a court has heard.

Professor Owen Arthurs, who conducted an examination of the 10-year-old’s body, concluded that these had been most likely caused by “multiple episodes of blunt force trauma inflicted over several weeks”.

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Welcome to our live coverage of the trial into the murder of Sara Sharif, which will resume on Wednesday with neighbours set to give evidence.

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