A man armed with an AK-47 assault rifle waves us down an alley. We’re in a small village in eastern Pakistan, to meet someone who says he can tell us how Sara Sharif’s family managed to hide from police for more than four weeks during an international police hunt.
He was the one who hid them, he tells us.
For nearly a month, police searched for the family of eight – Sara’s father Urfan Sharif, her stepmother Beinash Batool and uncle Faisal Malik, along with five of her siblings.
They had flown to Pakistan on 9 August 2023 – a day before 10-year-old Sara’s battered and lifeless body was found in a bedroom at their home in Woking, Surrey.
Having received a notice from Interpol to locate Sharif, Batool and Malik, police started a high profile search for the family across Pakistan, deploying multiple teams.
They suspected Rasikh Munir, a relative of Urfan Sharif’s, of helping them. But during multiple raids on his property, they failed to find the family.
The children were later found at another relative’s home. Mr Munir told us that was the moment Sharif, Batool and Malik decided to fly back to England, where they were finally arrested on 13 September 2023.
The BBC has followed the story in Pakistan since the first media reports of Sara’s death broke.
We met Rasikh Munir before Sara’s father, uncle and stepmother were put on trial for her murder in London, before the jury heard horrific details of the injuries that Sara had sustained – bite marks, iron burns and injuries caused by hot liquid.
He told us he had believed Sharif was innocent and that he’d taken the family in to protect the children. He also revealed extraordinary details: about how the family had hidden in corn fields when police raided his home at night and how he’d driven them around the local area, buying ice creams and even visiting hairdressers while detectives searched for them.
And remarkably, he said Sharif, Batool and Malik had been hiding in a neighbouring house just metres away from us as we spoke to Sara’s grandfather shortly after her siblings had been taken away by police.
A jury at London’s Old Bailey has now found Sharif and Batool guilty of murdering Sara. Malik was cleared of murder but has been found guilty of causing or allowing her death.
Olga DominWe meet Rasikh Munir on the outskirts of Sialkot, an industrial district in Punjab, surrounded by rice fields and corn crops.
There is barbed wire above the gate to his house and a security camera is trained on us. He welcomes us in, wearing a tracksuit and sliders.
Before we met, Mr Munir told me he’d done nothing wrong in hiding the family. There was no Interpol request for their arrest when he hid them, but he knew police wanted to speak to the family about Sara’s death.
When we come face-to-face, I wonder if he’ll be coy about his involvement, yet within minutes of entering the house, his tour begins.
“This was Urfan’s room,” he says, showing me a dark bedroom with the curtains closed and a white bed frame with a yellow patterned sheet. “They [Sharif and Malik] used to sleep here, they used this table for food.”
He points to a red plastic table and blue sofa. “They used to sit here with Beinash to contact the lawyer and discuss how they should talk to police in the UK.”
He takes me through to a second bedroom, hung with dark red curtains and a double bed squeezed beside a wooden wardrobe. This, he says, is where Batool and the children used to sleep – some on the bed, some on mattresses on the floor.
As we talk, I notice the outline of a gun tucked in his waistband. When we ask about the weapons, we are told they are for protection from thieves.
We climb out onto an open, flat roof, strung with an empty washing line. “From this roof, you could see the police from all four sides,” Mr Munir says pointing across the open fields.
Bar a few one-storey buildings and a scattering of trees, the view is nearly clear to the main road.
Police came to the property on several occasions at night. Mr Munir tells us the family hid from officers in a thick field of corn, a few metres away from the house – the adults and all five children hiding in the dark, in hot, humid conditions.
“No police ever checked this area. The kids had just one bag, they didn’t have many clothes with them. Most of their stuff was in my car, which I used to park in a safe place,” he says.
“The younger ones didn’t know what was happening,” he says. “They were scared, they couldn’t understand.”
This was not the first time the family had visited the house. Last time, Sara had been there too. “She was a very nice girl,” Mr Munir remembers.
During the international police hunt, he says the family stayed with him for several weeks, but they weren’t in permanent hiding.
He tells us he drove them back and forth between his house in Sialkot and the city of Jhelum, two hours away, where Sara’s grandfather lived. He took them to have haircuts in town and sometimes for ice cream and pizza.
Before the police hunt intensified, he says the family was able to pass through police checkpoints without incident.
But then the net began to tighten.
Just over three weeks into the search, police found Sara’s siblings at their grandfather’s home. The BBC spoke to him minutes after the raid.
“The police have taken away all the children,” Muhammad Sharif told us. “They were safe with me.” He said Sharif and Batool weren’t there during the raid, but the police took all five of the children.
We were the first journalists inside the house after the raid. The neon plastic toys the children had been playing with were still on the beds. The smashed door was freshly splintered.
Now, Mr Munir tells us something incredible.
As we’d been filming that day, Sara’s father, stepmother and uncle had been hiding in the house next door – just metres away.
He says police only had permission to go into the grandfather’s house, so couldn’t check other nearby properties.
Cameras had been installed, attached to a big LCD screen, so the family could see when the police were coming.
The night the police closed in, Mr Munir says Sara’s father, uncle and stepmother “ran away”. They called him and he went to pick them up.
He says the family realised the game was up the following day. A court instructed that the children be placed in a children’s home in Pakistan.
We attended the hearing. The eldest of the five children carried the youngest through a crowd of police officers and local journalists, trying to protect their faces from camera flashes.
Mr Munir says the loss of the children and the growing police pressure prompted the adults to return to the UK. He said Sharif, Batool and Malik then contacted a UK lawyer and Surrey Police to say they’d be back within days.
He told us he booked flights in their names, even though there was an Interpol notice to find them. Mr Munir said he drove the trio to the airport and that Urfan even called him from the departure lounge to say they had cleared airport security.
When they arrived at Gatwick Airport, all three were arrested for Sara’s murder. The following month, a court allowed all the siblings to stay temporarily with a relative in Pakistan. Surrey County Council is still trying to bring them back to the UK. Their family in Pakistan is fighting to keep them there.
It is difficult to confirm every aspect of Mr Munir’s story. He has no photos of the time the family was with him – his phone was taken by the police, he tells us.
He has remained consistent and detailed in his story. He didn’t come to us. After several months of searching, we found him. We also know the police raided his property and were suspicious of his involvement from early on.
Throughout our conversation I was curious why he was happy to speak to us.
“One should tell what has happened,” he says. “The person who hides reality is not a good person.”
But when Mr Munir took the family in, he knew the 10-year-old girl he had met several summers before had been found dead and that police wanted to speak to the three adults hiding in his house.
The murder trial in London has since heard how Sara’s body was found with dozens of injuries. She had been hooded, burned and beaten during more than two years of horrific abuse.
Mr Munir was clear, even before the trial, there should be consequences for her brutal death. “Whoever has done this to Sara should be punished because they have done a great injustice,” he says.
It seems a contradictory response from someone who knowingly hid the three adults.
I kept pressing Mr Munir on whether he felt he had done anything wrong in hiding the adults and why he had helped the family.
“The case was in the UK, it had nothing to do with Pakistan,” he says. “Had it been a matter in Pakistan then maybe I wouldn’t have taken such a big risk.
“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?”
Sara’s grandfather and other members of the family have repeatedly lodged complaints in court that their family members were picked up by police to apply pressure on them to give up their whereabouts.
Police in Pakistan deny this. They say, since the hunt, all the cases against the family have been dropped.
But the consequences of the decision to bring the five children to Pakistan are not over.
All five, who until that point had spent their lives in the UK, are still in Pakistan. For now, their future is still uncertain.
+ There are no comments
Add yours