Rising from her first-class seat to address the police officers who had boarded the flight at Heathrow to arrest her, Beinash Batool coolly asked: ‘I think you’re looking for us?’
As she and her husband, Urfan Sharif and his brother Faisal Malik were led off the plane in handcuffs, their fellow passengers might have been forgiven for thinking they had returned to face justice willingly.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, the three suspects were only delivered to British police on September 13 last year following an extraordinary – and controversial – operation in Pakistan to flush them out.
When they escaped on a British Airways flight from Heathrow to Islamabad on August 9 – the day after Sara’s murder – they knew very well that Pakistan had no extradition treaty with the UK.
They had paid £5,180 for the plane tickets and took five children with them, abandoning their car at Heathrow on the top floor of the terminal three short stay car park, with the keys still in the ignition.
As they had committed no crime on Pakistani soil, they had good reason to believe they were out of the reach of British law.
Not long after touching down, Sharif finally called Surrey Police to confess to the murder in the early hours of August 10.
On September 6, Sharif and Batool released a two minute and 36 second video claiming they are in hiding as they fear the Pakistan police will torture and kill them
Sara suffered an unimaginable ordeal at the hands of her father and stepmother
The home in Jhelum, Pakistan, where the three fugitives hid from authorities
Police and paramedics raced to their home in Woking where they found Sara’s body and launched an investigation.
Crucially, however, Sharif had not told them his whereabouts and the police didn’t even know what country he was in.
It took five days of extensive work by British detectives trawling through CCTV and flight records before they were able to confirm the group’s location and seek help from their counterparts in Pakistan.
On August 15, Nasir Mehmood Bajwa, the District Police Officer (DPO) for Jhelum in Pakistan, received an Interpol request via his bosses in Islamabad ‘to search and locate the suspects’.
Within 24 hours a further request came through, this time for an ‘urgent safe and well check’ on children, who were judged to be ‘at risk of significant harm’, travelling with Sharif, Batool and Malik.
It was this second alert, according to DPO Mehmood Bajwa, that prompted his men to adopt controversial methods to catch the killers.
‘They [Sharif and Batool] murdered a girl, so we had to do more for the safety of the children,’ he told the Mail. ‘We employed hard tactics to ensure their safety.’
He dispatched officers to visit the home of Muhammad Sharif, the father of Malik and Sharif, in the suburbs of Jhelum.
Urfan Sharif, Beinash Batool and Faisal Malik hid at this home in Jhelum, Pakistan
District Police Officer (DPO) for Jhelum in Pakistan, Nasir Mehmood Bajwa
Police tracked the fugitives down to this house in Jhelum, Pakistan
Sara was beaten to death by her abusive father in August last year 9
Mr Sharif senior answered the door with another son and they told officers they had not seen Sharif ‘since 2010’ and suggested he might be with Batool’s family in Mirpur 30 miles away, all of which later proved to be a lie.
Door-to-door inquiries also went nowhere.
With the clock ticking, Imran Hussain, one of the officers on the ground, said they went undercover.
‘We decided to use spies, people in civilian clothes,’ he explained to the Mail. ‘For that I went myself in plain clothes, on a motorbike.
‘I saw a small salon in front of the Sharif family house. So I went there, got my beard shaved, and got a haircut.
‘I asked about Urfan, about his family. Then I asked if they had come to Pakistan recently and he said that they had.
‘He mentioned that he had seen them just two days ago, and that they even came in to see him.’
Finally, a breakthrough. Sharif’s barber had just given him away.
Police officer Imran Hussain (pictured) was given a vital tip-off over where Urfan Sharif, Beinash Batool and Faisal Malik were hiding
Police were able to track them down after Sharif’s barber said he had seen the fugitive ‘just two days ago’
Urfan Sharif, 42, was emotionless as he was found guilty of murdering his daughter
Sara’s stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, wept as she was found guilty of murdering the girl
Sara’s uncle Faisal Malik, 29, was found guilty of causing or allowing the death of a child
‘This became a turning point,’ Mr Hussain recalled. ‘I checked the surrounding CCTV cameras and it confirmed they had come here.’
In the meantime, his colleagues in Islamabad had pulled CCTV footage from the airport showing Sharif’s uncle greeting him on arrival.
It confirmed what they had suspected, that family members were helping to conceal the fugitives.
With this evidence, DPO Mehmood Bajwa’s men raided Sharif’s father’s home.
The no-nonsense police chief explained: ‘There are only two ways – either the suspect surrenders, or the police must use high-handedness to get them.’
In this case, high-handedness amounted to using the threat of prosecuting the wider family to flush Sharif, Batool and Malik out.
He said they ‘caught’ 17 or 18 family members and ‘interrogated them properly’. Locals put it more bluntly.
‘They arrested everyone, and I mean everyone,’ a source said. ‘Not just a few relatives – but nearly the whole street.
Pakistani interrogated dozens of Sharif’s family members (Pictured: Urfan Sharif’s father, Muhammad Sharif)
A couple of hours after touching down in Pakistan, Sharif finally called Surrey Police to confess to his daughter’s murder
‘Any male who knew the family was taken into custody. They must have locked up over 20 people at least.’
But the police had a problem – they had no grounds on which to arrest the relatives. Within 48 hours they would have to produce a charge or release them.
This is where DPO Mehmood Bajwa’s team got ‘creative’ with the law, according to a lawyer with intimate knowledge of the proceedings.
‘Fake cases were made against the family of Urfan to pressurise them,’ they said.
The Mail has seen evidence of mendacious cases of armed robbery and kidnapping against Sharif’s brothers.
Sources said that even sex crime cases were filed. Incredibly, some of these fictional cases were read out in court in an effort to detain family members for longer.
‘The only people left alone in the family were elders or females,’ the lawyer said. ‘The rest of them were picked up by the police.’
Initially the tactics didn’t work and for weeks, Sharif, Batool and Malik proved elusive.
Bodycam footage shows Sara’s stepmother, Beinash Batool, 30, and her husband Urfan Sharif, 42, being removed from their first-class seats by police to be arrested for Sara’s murder
Sharif being arrested at Gatwick Airport on suspicion of his daughter’s murder
Sara’s uncle Faisal Malik is arrested by police officers on suspicion of her murder – he lived with Sara and her family in Woking
Sara Sharif, 10, was found dead with at least 71 injuries including beating and burn marks and a broken bone in her neck
Finally, the immense pressure put on relatives saw them give up addresses linked to the suspects, who were moving from house to house, trying to stay one step ahead.
And eventually the officers managed to track down children who had travelled with the trio to a property in Jhelum.
But police reports said that as they recovered the youngsters, officers looked out of the window only to watch on helplessly as ‘the adults sped away’, presumably in a car.
It was the end game, however, and the fugitives realised they could not keep running.
At this point Sharif, Batool and Malik went to the airport and flew home voluntarily, not appearing to have any contact with Pakistani police themselves.
But some believe a deal was struck where the suspects were told in no uncertain terms to go back to Britain or there would be continued pressure applied against their relatives.
Certainly, in normal circumstances, because there is no extradition treaty a good lawyer should have enabled them to avoid deportation for years.
The three treated themselves bought first-class tickets to London for £4,200 as a last hurrah – but it was to be their final taste of luxury before they were locked up awaiting trial.
It’s a luxury they are unlikely to enjoy ever again.
