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A former girlfriend of Sara Sharif’s father says she was left terrified when he held her captive in his home, held a knife to her face and cruelly blamed her for a miscarriage.
She first encountered Urfan Sharif when she came to the UK as a teenager from Poland and entered a relationship with the child killer, which she says soon turned abusive as he came jealous and controlling.
Reacting to his guilty conviction of torturing and murdering his 10-year-old daughter, the woman named Angelika told the Daily Mail: “All I was thinking is that could have been me, that could have been my child. It was a big shock – but also, I knew he was capable of it.”
Such was her terror of the taxi driver, now aged 42, that she fled out of a window when trapped inside his home, and returned to Poland to escape him.
He had jealously watched her every move, stolen her passport and had tried to burn her initials onto his skin, she says.
When she lost their child, Angelika says he accused her of having an abortion in a confrontation she described as “so painful”, which prompted her to leave the relationship for good.
“That was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “But now, in some dark way, I feel lucky that this did not happen to my child.”
She first met Sharif, who was nine years her senior, while working at Burger King in Woking where he was her shift manager. While their relationship worked well at the beginning, she said his jealousy would lead him to return to the flat in a rage, throwing her on the couch and accusing her of cheating.
In the winter of 2007, his behaviour worsened with Angelika saying that he stood over her with a folding chair before picking up a knife.
“He held the knife right up to my neck and told me: ‘You are mine and only mine.’ He said that I am not going anywhere without him, and that if I ever talk to anyone again it will be the end of me,” she said.
After escaping, she reported him to the police who arrested him and held him in a prison cell for 48 hours. “Urfan has two faces. One is kind, nice, very lovely and always apologises. But the second face, the one people don’t see, it is the devil,” she said.
She eventually retracted her statement and returned to Poland, where he continued to pester her and beg for her forgiveness, until she agreed to reconcile in March 2008. She soon became pregnant, news which delighted Sharif, but this would take a sour turn after she lost the baby.
It was during a trip to Poland to obsessively stalk Angelika when he allegedly met Olga Domin, Sara’s mother, and invited her to return to the UK with him to pursue a relationship.
“Listening to the details that are released now, that he was abusing for such a long time. His own child. Oh my God, my heart is very broken. It’s broken into a million pieces,” she said.
She added that she had followed the trial every day, and hoped that Sharif would receive the “harshest punishment possible” for his crimes.
“Because every day I was thinking that could have been me. I have this always on my mind now – always.
“If I had stayed in a relationship with him it would have got worse and worse and worse. That could have been my life.”
Sharif was found guilty of murdering Sara alongside his wife Beinash Batool, after the schoolgirl was found dead at their family home in Surrey with over 70 injuries. She had also endured 25 fractures, a traumatic brain injury, scalding to her ankles and a burn to her buttocks from a domestic iron.
An investigation revealed she had been subjected to a “campaign of abuse” in the final years of her life, which had seen her tormented with a cricket bat and metal pole, and kept from school to hide her injuries.
Following a trial at the Old Bailey, both were convicted and face life behind bars, while Sharif’s brother Faisal Malik was found guilty of causing or allowing her death.
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