WORDS fail us when we attempt to understand the short life and horrific death of ten-year-old Sara Sharif.
A jury at the Old Bailey convicted Sara’s father, Urfan Sharif, and her stepmother, Beinash Batool, of her murder on August 8 last year.
Urfan Sharif’s brother, Faisal Malik, lived with the family and was found guilty of causing or allowing the death of a child.
Again and again, I have seen the murderers of this little girl referred to as “animals”.
But we know — don’t we? — there is no animal on God’s earth that would have inflicted such cruelty.
The mind reels at the horror.
When Sara’s life ended, her back had been broken ten times.
Even as she lay dying, her father beat her with a metal pole. Animals?
No, only human beings can inflict such murderous sadism.
And I hear calls for Sara’s father, stepmother and uncle to “suffer the way that Sara suffered”.
But if they live to be 100 years old in some cosy jail cell, they will never suffer even a fraction of what Sara endured.
Bite marks. Beatings with a cricket bat. Burns from an iron.
Our minds recoil with horror at the stories of torture coming out of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.
But little Sara Sharif suffered her torture in Woking, Surrey — a Home Counties town.
Urfan Sharif, her father, spent a lifetime brutalising the women who were unlucky enough to enter his life
He came to this country as a student. EU laws allowed him to remain after marrying Sara’s Polish mother.
He should not have been in the country. He should not have had care and control of his daughter.
He should not have been free to flee to Pakistan after Sara died.
But all these things happened, and we are told that everyone failed Sara Sharif — social services, police, her teachers, the courts. And no doubt that is all true.
And no doubt there will be an inquiry into what happened, how a child’s injuries could be hidden under her hijab, and the social services, police and teachers will all swear that nothing like this must ever happen again.
But nothing can change the suffering of Sara.
A children’s services boss whose team could have intervened to save Sara has been urged to return her OBE.
Return her OBE! What a pathetically inadequate response.
We should be asking . . . what is wrong with us?
How did adults get away with torturing a child? How did they come so close to escaping justice for their unspeakable crimes?
The murderers of Sara Sharif fled to Pakistan when she died.
And they were only returned to this country to face justice because of the incredible efforts of the Pakistani police.
There is no extradition treaty between Pakistan and the UK.
But the unstinting and rigorous efforts of a Pakistani detective called District Police Officer Nasir Mehmood Bajwa and his officers in Jhelum ensured that Sharif, Batool and Malik were put on a plane to Heathrow where our more slow-witted plods were waiting to arrest them to bring them to justice. Justice?
Words fail us again.
Because Sharif, Batool and Malik can rot in jail for the rest of their lives.
The British taxpayer will feed them, clothe them and ensure they are treated with a level of human decency that little Sara Sharif was never shown.
But that is hardly justice for Sara, is it?
Music fans of a certain vintage increasingly ask me, is this young Sabrina Carpenter that’s suddenly everywhere any relation to Karen and Richard Carpenter, the squeaky-clean queen and king of Seventies pop?
Good question.
As the Espresso singer stepped out in New York in a mini skirt that did nothing to stop the freezing wind that was whipping right up Broadway, I can exclusively reveal that Sabrina is no relation to the Carpenters.
And bears absolutely no similarity.
LABOUR’S deluded, lemming-like rush to net zero will end in tears, blackouts and higher energy bills.
And it is a cruel and bitter irony that in the same week Energy Secretary Ed Miliband was neglecting to inform us how wind and solar can possibly help us on dark winter days, Labour were quietly ditching a Tory pledge to make sure rubbish collections are done at least every other week.
Vermin. Stink.
Our bins overfloweth.
Labour will not make the UK a “clean superpower” by allowing councils to collect your rubbish around once a month.
But they will turn us into the filthiest country in Europe.
What’s clean about that, Ed?
FOR a long time I thought of Reform UK as the political equivalent of Chelsea Football Club – a generational superstar surrounded by a rag-tag gaggle of dimmer lights.
But now Chelsea are suddenly no longer just Cole Palmer plus a chaotic supporting team and suddenly Reform looks like more than Nigel Farage’s one-man band.
Ladbrokes now has Nigel Farage as favourite to become the next UK Prime Minister.
Reform may only have five MPs but they got four million votes at the general election.
Reform has that political magic dust – momentum.
The defection of Tim Montgomerie, for decades a Conservative voice of intelligence and moderation, is a bigger coup for Reform than landing billionaire Nick Candy as the party’s fundraiser.
Reform could still fail to get anywhere near 10 Downing Street.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) got 11million votes at the last election in France – still not enough to win power.
With RN and Reform, there remains a real fear of their Fruitcake Tendency – the ugly wing of the far Right.
At the local elections in May, Reform can’t afford to have a significant number of candidates who turn out to hail from the Fruitcake Tendency.
But Reform UK will not go away as long as Nigel Farage stays interested.
And neither will the party of Disraeli, Churchill, Macmillan, Thatcher and Boris.
The Right must eventually come to some accommodation.
Or you can place your bets on five more years of shagged-out socialism.
PRESIDENT-Elect Donald Trump says the US “should have nothing to do with Syria”.
Trump’s reluctance to get the West into another Middle Eastern war is to be admired.
But six million Syrians were displaced because of their civil war, triggering one of the greatest refugee crises in human history.
If millions of Syrians again flee to the West, then looking the other way will not be an option.
Phil Shiner is the laughably named “human rights lawyer” who used millions in legal aid to hound innocent British soldiers through the courts with total lies about their conduct in the Iraq War.
After the trauma of combat, veterans suffered the trauma of being mercilessly harassed by Shiner’s taxpayer-funded perversion of the law.
Innocent heroes were falsely accused of abuse, torture and murder.
The lying legal lowlife was found to have acted dishonestly, including around the five-year, £31million Al-Sweady Inquiry.
Shiner, who was struck off as a solicitor in 2017 for misconduct and dishonesty, pleaded guilty to fraud, but the judge suspended his two- year jail sentence because his grotesque offences “were a long time ago”.
I bet Shiner’s offences do not seem like a long time ago to the heroes he pursued to the edge of ruin.
Shiner is a disgrace to the legal profession.
He is a traitor to this country.
And he should be in a prison cell.
DEMI MOORE beams on a film festival red carpet with her pet pooch, Pilaf.
The actress was there to promote her horror movie, The Substance.
But Pilaf is a dog with nearly 50,000 followers on her own individual Instagram page.
She hung out with Lady Gaga and Colin Farrell when she made an appearance on The Graham Norton Show.
And Pilaf obviously thinks those cameras are just for her.
