Sara Sharif, the 10-year-old UK girl found alone and dead in her family home, was so badly injured her mum and grandmother could hardly recognise her in a morgue.
Police found Sara’s injured body in her Woking home, south of London, after her father fled the UK in a jet and called authorities after he touched down in Pakistan.
Urfan Sharif remains on the run but his under-pressure family are urging him to surrender following the detention of a number of relatives by police in Pakistan.
In a Polish TV interview, Sara’s mother and grandmother described the injuries they claimed to have seen on the schoolgirl’s body when they went to identify her in a mortuary.
“One of her cheeks was swollen and the other side was bruised,” Olga Sharif, Sara’s mum, said.
“Even now, when I close my eyes I can see what my baby looked like.”
Sara had been dressed in Mickey Mouse pyjamas, she said, and her body was covered with a quilt.
“No mother should see something like that,” she said.
Olga Sharif split from her husband in 2017 and she had only seen Sara twice in that time, she told The Sun newspaper.
Sara’s grandmother was in tears describing what it was like going to the morgue.
She said Sara ”was entirely changed and bruised” and “if someone hadn’t told me it was Sara, I wouldn’t have believed it”.
Cut off from her mother, Sara was living with her father, stepmother Beinash Batool, her uncle and her five brothers and sisters in the Woking house when she died.
Since August 9, he’s believed to have been hiding out with Batool, his brother and children in Pakistan.
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Urfan’s father Muhammad Sharif, 68, told The Guardian his son had sent him a voice message last week asking for advice on what to do.
Muhammad said he’d urged Urfan to come forward because of the heat his family was feeling from police searching for the wanted group.
“I got in contact with Urfan earlier this week for the first time since his hiding,” Muhammad said, outside his home in Jhelum, where Urfan grew up.
“He contacted me through voice message. I urged him to surrender as we are unable to bear this pressure now.
“I asked him to defend your case in court of law and relieve us and we cannot bear the police pressure and more arrests.”
In an earlier interview, Muhammad Sharif claimed Urfan hadn’t told him how Sara had died, except that it was an “accident”, and that his son was hiding “because of fear”.
Police in Pakistan have detained several family members over the past few weeks, as the manhunt ramped up.
From an unknown location, Sara’s dad and stepmum last week released a surprise video to make their first public comments since her death.
Reading from a notebook, Batool described Sara’s death as an “incident” and then claimed they were too scared to hand themselves in to police in Pakistan.
Batool spent only two sentences referring to Sara, while Urfan Sharif said nothing during the brief, low-quality video.
There is no formal extradition treaty between the UK and Pakistan.
UK police are working with international agencies, including Interpol and the UK Foreign Office to progress their enquiries with Pakistani authorities.
