Mohammed Abdul Shakur, 46, spent years on the run after killing 26-year-old Juli Begum and daughters Anika and Thanha, aged five and six, on New Year’s Day 2007

An abusive husband will be sentenced on Thursday for murdering his estranged wife and their two young children.

Mohammed Abdul Shakur, 46, spent years on the run after killing 26-year-old Juli Begum and daughters Anika and Thanha, aged five and six, on New Year’s Day 2007.

Following a trial at the Old Bailey last year, Shakur was found guilty of carrying out the murders at the family home in East Ham, east London.

The court had heard the couple had an arranged marriage in Bangladesh when Ms Begum was 19 but Shakur was repeatedly violent towards his wife and did not like their children much because they were not boys.

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – It’s time to shatter the silence around violence against women in the Kurdistan Region. That’s the message of an exhibit that opens Monday in Erbil and is both a memorial to the women killed in 2019 and a tribute to the people working on the front line helping Kurdistan’s women.

“We don’t talk about rape. We don’t talk about honour killing. We don’t talk about violence, because it’s taboo,” explained artist and activist Dashni Morad, the driving force behind the HERStory exhibition.

That taboo comes from the culture, Morad believes. “For decades, especially in an Islamic-dominated region… the honour of the woman is the honour of the family, the brother, the father.” If a woman does something deemed damaging to the family’s honour, “there’s an unspoken code of ‘take care of it’” and the community will turn a blind eye to the crime, she said. 

A Birmingham uncle has been jailed after trying to force his niece into a marriage in Pakistan – where she was “kept prisoner” for over a year.

The victim, now 21, was ubjected to savage beatings at the hands of her relative and one occasion had a gun put to her head.

She eventually managed to flee from Pakistan after she was clandestinely smuggled back to the UK.

The 55-year-old uncle, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was previously found guilty of arranging a forced marriage and two charges of cruelty.

He was today sentenced to seven years in jail.