London, March 14: Rahan Arshad, 36, a Pakistani taxi driver in Manchester, rained down 23 crushing blows with a heavy rounders bat on his wife Uzma, 32, who had been having an affair with a 41-year-old family friend, Nasir Akhtar Iqbal.
But Arshad then did what many Asian fathers in Britain seem to do in cases of marriage break-up — one by one, he took his sleeping sons, Adam, 11, and Abbas, eight, and daughter Henna, six, from their bedroom to a playroom downstairs where he bludgeoned them to death.
When he was eventually arrested and brought back last year from Thailand, where Arshad fled after the murders, he apparently told police officers: “I confess to the murder. My beautiful kids. I don’t regret killing that ******* b****, but my kids, killing my kids.…”
He claimed he had killed his wife when he found she was the one responsible for their deaths.
But at the Manchester crown court yesterday, a jury of four men and eight women — they had wept at certain points, so distressing had been the evidence — took a little over two hours to find Arshad guilty of all four murders.
Nor had they been spur-of-the-moment killings. The flight to Thailand was booked on July 11, 2006, and the rounders bat bought on July 27. On July 28, he even took the children for an evening out to Blackpool Pleasure Beach for fun rides.
The next day, the killing orgy took place though the bodies were not discovered until August 20 when neighbours, detecting the foul smell coming from Arshad’s house on Turves Road, Cheadle Hulme, Greater Manchester, called police.
Uzma’s body was found in the master bedroom. The children’s remains were so decomposed that it took dental tests to identify them.
Passing the sentence, Justice Clarke said: “The jury have convicted you on overwhelming evidence of the brutal and horrific murder of your wife and children. The only sentence permitted by law is life imprisonment on each count. You killed your entire family in circumstances of great brutality. You beat your wife to death in her bedroom and then coldly and deliberately, you brought your sleepy children downstairs to meet their deaths.”
These days a debate is under way in Britain about whether some murderers should be let out early if there were extenuating circumstances but the judge added firmly: “Life imprisonment in your case means life.”
Arshad, wearing a dark suit with blue shirt and tie, only bowed his head and swallowed hard as the verdicts were read out.
Uzma’s mother, Safia Hassnain, and two brothers, Rahat Ali and Mustajab Ali Haider, were in the public gallery to hear the decision. Rahat Ali shouted “Yes” as the jury convicted Arshad of his sister’s murder.
In a statement outside the court, one of the brothers said: “No one can heal the grief we have suffered. Uzma was my best friend, beloved sister and beautiful daughter. My mother can’t understand how he could destroy her. The judge made a brilliant decision. A person like this shouldn’t ever be freed.”
Also speaking outside the court, detective superintendent Martin Bottomley, who led the murder hunt, said: “It is a case which I will never forget. It was so horrific.”