Girl, 12, drowned in river after friend said ‘she’d kill her if she didn’t get in’
A schoolgirl drowned moments after a friend ‘joked’ she was ‘going to kill her if she didn’t get in the water’, an inquest heard.
The body of Shukri, 12, was pulled from the River Irwell near Bury town centre, after she failed to return home from school on June 27, 2019.
An inquest into her death on Monday was told how the youngster, who couldn’t swim, went to the river during a heatwave with two other girls, who for legal reasons were referred to in court as Child 1 and Child 2.
Giving evidence in Heywood, Child 1’s guardian said around three or four days after Shukri’s death, Child 1 asked to speak to her, saying: ‘There is something I need to tell you’.
The guardian said: ‘She said when they were walking towards the river she said to Shukri “If you don’t get in the water I’m going to kill you” in a laughing and joking manner’.
‘She said she wasn’t sure Shukri was going to get in the water. She wanted someone else to come in the water with her.
‘She felt she had done something really bad. I said we all say things we don’t mean, but said I would have to report it to the police. She was happy for me to report it.
‘She knew it wasn’t the right comment to make with the way things turned out, but she wanted people to know it wasn’t meant in the way she said it.
‘She told me she would show Shukri how to swim, she said something along the lines of “I told her I would save her if she couldn’t swim”.’
Child 1 said she got in the water and saw Shukri walking into the water.
She doesn’t recall exactly what happened after that.
The guardian added the three girls had earlier been to her house, where she had given them dinner and they had played in Child 1’s bedroom ‘laughing and giggling like typical teenage girls’.
William Keenan and Steven Duckworth told the inquest they were fishing on the river about 400-500 yards away when two children ran along the path and told them that Shukri had fallen in.
The two friends ran to the spot where the children had been playing, close to a fast running weir.
They waded into the river and dived under the water in an attempt to rescue her.
Senior coroner Joanne Kearsley praised Mr Keenan and Mr Duckworth for their bravery.
Shukri’s mum, Zamzam Ture, told the inquest how on the night of her daughter’s death, she had called the police after frantically searching for her in a nearby park and at a relative’s house after she failed to come home from school.
She also told the inquest Shukri, who was born in a Kenyan refugee camp to Somalian parents before moving to the UK in January, 2017, couldn’t swim and was ‘scared’ of water.
Lisa Parker, a maths teacher at Broad Oak Sports College, which has since been renamed Hazel Wood High School, told the inquest Shukri, of Wash Lane, Bury, was a ‘happy, chatty’ pupil who was also ‘a bit cheeky’.
The inquest is expected to last five days.