A ‘vulnerable’ woman or an ‘evil psycho’ stepmother?
In court, Beinash Batool was portrayed by her barrister as the ‘fearful’ wife of a husband who was a ‘violent disciplinarian’ and ‘controlling bully’.
But Urfan Sharif claimed that it was Batool who was the ‘true villain’ and the ‘crazy’ one.
While he admitted ‘full responsibility’ for killing his daughter Sara, precisely where the balance of power lay in this couple’s deeply dysfunctional marriage is unlikely ever to be known.
But the inescapable truth is that without Batool, Sara almost certainly would never have been placed in an environment where beatings and abuse were commonplace.
After all, it was 30-year-old Batool who was described as a ‘loving’ stepmum and whose ‘positive influence’ helped convince the authorities to give the couple full custody of the ten-year-old in 2019.
Yet the beatings began almost as soon as Sara started living with them.
Neighbours reported hearing the sounds of children screaming, followed by Batool shouting ‘shut the f*** up’ and ‘go to your room you f****** bastard’.
She was also frequently heard referring to children as ‘c****’.
Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool pictured together
Beinash Batool was found guilty of murdering her stepdaughter
Batool (pictured) was raised by her housewife mother and taxi driver father in Luton, Bedfordshire
Batool’s lies were exposed after the death of Sara Sharif, 10, who she and husband Urfan Sharif tortured for years
Two years before Sara died, Batool messaged her sister saying ‘Urfan beat the crap out of Sara’, that she was ‘covered in bruises, literally beaten black’ and that the ‘poor girl can’t walk’.
And yet she clearly did little or nothing to stop the abuse. If, indeed, she did not actively take part in it herself.
Bite marks were found on Sara’s body after her death.
Forensic tests proved they did not match Sharif or his brother’s teeth, both of whom provided their dental impressions. But Batool refused to do the same.
She also declined to give evidence during the trial, leaving it to her barrister to claim that the reason she had not once sought help for Sara was to be found in her past – a past that had left her vulnerable to Sharif, estranged from her family and with nowhere else to go.
The reality is that the Bedfordshire-born housewife was no innocent, having left a trail of destruction in her personal life that included a love triangle, a possibly bigamous marriage and the invention of an elaborate story about being the mother of twins.
Batool’s journey to the dock of the Old Bailey began in a semi-detached house in Luton where she was raised by her taxi driver father, and housewife mother.
She grew up alongside her older sister Qandeela, 31, as well as two younger sisters and a little brother in a British-Pakistani Muslim family.
Sara’s stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, wept as she was found guilty of murdering the girl
Luton-born Batool had three men on the go at once and presented herself as a rich Londoner
Beinash Batool, (stepmother, left), Faisal Malik, (uncle, centre) and Urfan Sharif (father, right) were arrested on their return to the UK after fleeing for Pakistan in the aftermath of Sara’s death
Balloons, flowers and tributes lay outside Sara’s home in Woking, Surrey following her death
But in 2012, aged just 18, Batool fled home to live with her boyfriend, Ali Mir, following a huge family fallout over their relationship.
The pair had met the previous year, Mr Mir having arrived in the UK from Pakistan on a student visa.
The couple told their respective parents they intended to marry, a plan that did not go down well with Batool’s ‘old fashioned, traditional’ family.
It would be claimed in court that she was ‘kept against her will’ in her uncle’s house until she agreed to call off the relationship.
On being released, she immediately went to the police and the young lovers were relocated to a refuge in Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset for couples fleeing honour-based abuse.
Soon after they married in an Islamic Nikah ceremony in the UK. A religious ceremony, a Nikah is not legally binding unless it is registered officially.
But in 2013 Mr Mir’s college shut down, invalidating his student visa and prompting his return to Pakistan.
Before he left, the couple agreed to make their marriage official to secure his return to Britain on a spousal visa.
Batool struck up a relationship with Luton ‘bad boy’ Shamraiz Khan (pictured)
Khan was arrested in March 2015, and later jailed, for his role in smuggling £200,000 worth of heroin from Pakistan to the UK hidden inside mini footballs
Khan was deported from Britain in 2017 after being convicted for his role in smuggling £200,000 worth of heroin from Pakistan to the UK
But then Batool almost immediately struck up a relationship with Luton ‘bad boy’ Shamraiz Khan, 42.
Another whirlwind romance ensued followed by a second ‘marriage’ in another secret Nikah ceremony.
Acquaintances at the time remember how, following the wedding, Batool styled herself as well-off ‘Aysha Khan’ from London. ‘She made herself appear as though she was really rich,’ one said.
Then, in 2014, with one ‘husband’ in Pakistan and another in Luton, a third man came on the scene – Urfan Sharif. The pair met when he picked her up in his taxi.
Batool’s complicated love life became somewhat easier to manage in March 2015 when Khan was arrested and later jailed for his role in smuggling £200,000 worth of heroin from Pakistan to the UK hidden inside mini footballs.
However, Batool found herself in legal trouble the following month.
She was hauled before magistrates for stealing gold jewellery from a friend she had been staying with and selling it for £411.
Such was her scheming that when the friend discovered the theft, Batool bought replica jewellery which she tried to pass off as the original item.
Beinash Batool (pictured in court) lied to Sharif and social services about being the mother to twins – who didn’t exist
Sara was failed by authorities after a decade of missed opportunities to stop her violent father
Messages sent by Batool to her older sister detailing some of the abuse Sara was put through
Batool and Sharif made Sara wear a hijab to cover up the extent of her injuries at school and outside of the house
Batool admitted theft and fraud by false representation and walked free with a conditional discharge.
With Khan now out of the picture, she moved in with Sharif, whose own relationship with Olga had broken down.
Once they were living together, she soon fell pregnant.
This put her in an awkward position, given two men already thought they were ‘married’ to her, in the eyes of God if not the law.
And so it was Batool concocted an extraordinary story.
To explain her pregnancy when she visited Khan in prison, she told him she was expecting his twins.
At the same time, she told Sharif she already had twins with Khan.
This, she said, was why she needed to visit Khan in jail – so they could discuss arrangements for their care, sometimes claiming the ‘children’ were in Luton, and sometimes that they were in fact in Pakistan.
Sharif recalled she showed him fake photos of her supposed twins, and would even send them birthday cards and gifts each year.
Meanwhile, Batool helped Sharif to get supervised visiting rights for his own daughter Sara, who had been cared for by her mother since 2015.
And it was due ‘largely’ to the influence of his new partner that after Sharif and Olga divorced in 2017, his visits became unsupervised.
By then Khan had been deported to Pakistan to serve the remainder of his prison sentence.
Meanwhile, Batool’s first ‘husband’ Ali Mir had returned to the UK on a spouse visa after they succeeded in registering their marriage officially.
Somehow, she kept her new living arrangements secret, because in 2018 Batool and Sharif tied the knot themselves in a civil ceremony in Surrey, suggesting theirs was a bigamous marriage.
Eventually, however, Mr Mir discovered her duplicity and returned to Pakistan heartbroken in 2019.
The Mail tracked him down to Jhelum, where Mr Mir was still visibly upset by what he had been through, declining to comment on ‘personal matters’.
That year, Batool succeeded in her greatest deception yet, convincing social services that she would be a ‘caring’ stepmother to Sara, after Sharif argued for custody following allegations of abuse against Olga.
Olga said of the decision: ‘Social services knew he had been abusive, but they said he was changing because he had got a new wife.’
Indeed, Batool was designated the sole ‘supervisor’ of any visits Olga had to see Sara – a testament to how highly she was thought of by the local authority.
Tragically, the household could not have been a more dangerous place for Sara.
From the messages Batool sent to her sister we know that the sadistic cruelty started almost immediately.
In these, Batool made out that it all done by her husband, but were they just another of her deceptions, an example of the ‘manipulative’ – according to Sharif’s barrister – streak that flowed through everything she did?
Knowing they might one day be caught, was this Batool’s attempt to lay a fake trail of evidence implicating Sharif and exonerating herself?
For her part, it does not appear that Batool’s sister Qandeela reported the abuse to authorities. From the messages that were read in court, the only advice she appears to have offered was for her sister to read the Quran more.
In 2022, Sharif finally uncovered Batool’s deception over the ‘twins’ after discovering a letter from Khan demanding to see evidence that they existed. In November that year, Sharif went to Pakistan saying he wanted a divorce.
But Batool’s mother joined with Sharif’s father to talk him into returning and he came back the following month.
Some eight months later, on August 10 last year, Sara’s broken body was found left in a bunk bed in the family’s flat after her father and stepmother had fled abroad.
Nearby were the girl’s letters and a red notebook.
In one undated and misspelled note to Sharif and Batool, Sara wrote that she was ‘sorry for being rude’ and ‘answering back’.
The schoolgirl died on August 8, 2023, with her body being found under a blanket in her bunk bed
Batool left a trail of destruction in her personal life, keeping two secret husbands and inventing an elaborate story about being the mother of twins
Sara Sharif as a toddler
It concluded with the words: ‘Please forgive me I am so, so sorry.’
Another to her father poignantly stated: ‘I love you so much. Our family is the best in town.’
Police also found a heartbreaking story she had written about a queen called ‘Beinash’ and a princess called ‘Sara’ in which Batool was described as the ‘best caring and loving mother in the world’.
As the world now knows, in reality her life could not have been more different.
Rather than a fairytale, it was a horror story in which the two people who should have cared most for their little princess did the very opposite.
