Son killed for not knowing Qur'an

CARDIFF. January 8. KAZINFORM A mother who beat her seven-year-old son to death for failing to learn the Qur'an by heart and burned his body in an attempt to hide her crime has been jailed for life.
None
None

Sara Ege, 33, collapsed and had to be helped sobbing from the dock after being told she would serve 17 years before she could be considered for parole.

Ege treated her son Yaseen "like a dog" when he struggled to memorise passages of the holy book of Islam, Cardiff crown court heard. Over three months, she beat him until he collapsed on the floor of his bedroom - still mumbling verses - and died.

Ege used barbecue lighting gel to set fire to the boy's body. Initially, emergency services believed he had been killed in a blaze at the family home in the Welsh capital. But a postmortem revealed he had died before the fire started and had suffered multiple injuries to his body including broken ribs, a fractured arm and a fractured finger.

A serious case review, published after Ege was jailed, revealed that staff at Yaseen's school had been concerned on "one or two occasions" about the boy but their worries had not been passed on to children's services or police.

Several agencies and individuals worked with Ege but the serious case review said there was "no co-ordinated plan" and the extent of her "social and cultural isolation" - and the possibility that Yaseen might be at risk - were not realised or understood.

It highlighted that agencies had been made aware on two occasions of allegations that Yaseen had suffered domestic abuse. On the first occasion, the allegations were not passed on to the police; on the second, Ege declined offers of intervention, Kazinform quotes the Guardian.

In court, the jury heard that Ege, a mathematics graduate who had entered competitions as a girl to demonstrate her own knowledge of the Qur'an, had struggled to have a child. Before Yaseen was born, she suffered depression as a result of a series of miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. After his birth, she had postnatal depression. The court also heard that she had difficult relationships with her husband, taxi driver Yousef Ege, 38, and her mother-in-law.

Read more

Currently reading