https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14140831/Sara-Sharif-police-Pakistan-false-charges-fathers-family.html?login¶m_code=14v7oudnzl7ur5kdfrsp¶m_state=eyJyZW1lbWJlck1lIjpmYWxzZSwicmFuZG9tU3RhdGUiOiIyNzYxMWE4NS0yMTczLTRiNDUtYjRiMC00ZmYwMGU2NzM4OTIifQ%3D%3D¶m_info=%7B%22signinStatus%22%3A%22authenticated%22%2C%22signinMethod%22%3A%22password%22%2C%22dataCaptured%22%3Afalse%7D¶m__host=www.dailymail.co.uk¶m_geolocation=row&base_fe_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2F&validation_fe_uri=%2Fregistration%2Fp%2Fapi%2Ffield%2Fvalidation%2F&check_user_fe_uri=registration%2Fp%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fuser_check%2F&isMobile=falseThe controversial 'hard tactics' that brought Sara Shariff's killers to justice: How Pakistani police snared Urfan Sharif by targeting his family with 'fake cases'
By ANDY JEHRING and SHAHZAIB WAHLAH IN PAKISTAN
Published: 17:09, 11 December 2024 | Updated: 18:20, 11 December 2024
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 killing her in the early hours of August 10. 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. 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. ‘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. 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. A lawyer acting for the Sharif family alleges this is where DPO Mehmood Bajwa’s team got ‘creative’ with the law. The Mail has seen evidence of cases of armed robbery and kidnapping against Sharif’s brothers. Some of these cases were read out in court in an effort ‘to detain family members for longer’, according to the lawyer. ‘Fake cases were made against the family of Urfan to pressurise them,’ they claimed.
The lawyer added: ‘The only people left alone in the family were elders or females. The rest of them were picked up by the police.’
However, Pakistani police categorically deny allegations of mendacious cases and say they were legitimate complaints, made by members of the public which they followed up and subsequently dropped. Hussain said: ‘The complaint was made by someone else, separately to us. They were not filed by us.’
Initially the tactics didn’t work and for weeks, Sharif, Batool and Malik proved elusive. ‘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. A lawyer acting for the Sharif family alleges this is where DPO Mehmood Bajwa’s team got ‘creative’ with the law. The Mail has seen evidence of cases of armed robbery and kidnapping against Sharif’s brothers. Some of these cases were read out in court in an effort ‘to detain family members for longer’, according to the lawyer. ‘Fake cases were made against the family of Urfan to pressurise them,’ they claimed.
The lawyer added: ‘The only people left alone in the family were elders or females. The rest of them were picked up by the police.’
However, Pakistani police categorically deny allegations of mendacious cases and say they were legitimate complaints, made by members of the public which they followed up and subsequently dropped. Hussain said: ‘The complaint was made by someone else, separately to us. They were not filed by us.’
Initially the tactics didn’t work and for weeks, Sharif, Batool and Malik proved elusive.
