LONDON: Beinash Batool, the stepmother of dead British schoolgirl Sara Sharif, has been urged to hand herself in to the police by a relative.
Batool, 29, is currently thought to be in hiding with Sara’s father, Urfan Sharif, in Pakistan, along with Urfan’s brother Faisal Malik. All three are wanted for questioning in connection with the death of the death of Sara, aged 10, whose body was found on Aug. 10 the day after the trio left the UK.
A cousin of Batool, who requested to remain anonymous, urged her to return to the UK.
The cousin told Sky News: “Beinash should come back to the UK.
“I don’t know where she is. But I’m worried about her. I’m worried about her kids. She should come back to the UK, go to the police and tell them exactly what happened.”
She added: “I don’t know — my family don’t know — what happened. It could have been an accident; a misunderstanding.”
The cousin added that Batool had become estranged from her own parents as a result of her marriage to Urfan Sharif.
“The relationship (with her family) is finished,” she said. “She married secretly, and her father said, ‘she is not my daughter.’ She hasn’t spoken to her parents since.”
The revelations come a day after Urfan Sharif’s father urged his son to hand himself in. Police in the Pakistani city of Jhelum, where Sharif’s family is from, were reprimanded by a Rawalpindi court last week after it emerged that two of his relatives had been illegally detained and questioned by police over his whereabouts.
An international manhunt is underway for the three, with Interpol and other agencies in the UK and Pakistan doing their “level best” to locate the trio, who are believed to be accompanied by five of Sharif’s children.
Sara’s body was found at her home in Woking, Surrey, after police in the UK received a phone call from her father expressing fears for her safety from the Pakistani capital Islamabad. She and the family were known to police and social services.
A postmortem examination has failed to determine the cause of death, but stated that the girl had “suffered multiple and extensive injuries” that were “likely to have been caused over a sustained and extended period of time.” An inquest into the death has heard it was “likely to be unnatural” despite apparent claims by family members that she had been injured in a fall.
