A MAN who murdered his wife and their two children in 2006 before fleeing to Bangladesh has been jailed for 40 years.
Mohammed Abdul Shakur, 46, was found guilty at the Old Bailey last year of the murder of his wife, 26-year-old Juli Begum, and their two daughters, five-year-old Anika Khanum and six-year-old Thanha Khanum, at the family home in East Ham.
At the same court on Thursday (6), the Bangladeshi was sentenced to life imprisonment to serve a minimum of 40 years.
The court heard that the police were called to the family address in Nelson Street, E6, at around 12.35pm on January 1, 2007, after a concerned family member had not seen or heard from Juli for around 10 days, and the children had not returned to school after the Christmas break.
The police forced their entry into the address. There they found the bodies of Juli, Anika and Thanha concealed under a duvet in a rear bedroom.
Detectives had launched a murder investigation and Shakur was quickly identified as a suspect after it emerged that he had purchased a one-way ticket to Bangladesh at the time of the murder.
Juli, Thanha, and Anika.
Several years passed by without any trace of Shakur. However, in May 2013, the Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) representative called the detectives to inform them that Shakur had been arrested for being in India illegally.
It is thought that he had been crossing back and forth between the countries on a regular basis for work.
Formal extradition proceedings began, and Shakur said he would not oppose extradition.
The process was not completed until April 2019, when Shakur was finally extradited back to the UK on April 6. He was taken to the Heathrow police station, where he was charged with three counts of murder. He did not make any comment.
The court would hear that Shakur and Juli had had an arranged marriage in Bangladesh in 1999, and she had subsequently sponsored his immigration visa so that they could return to the UK.
However, incidents of domestic conflict began to emerge just a few months into the marriage.
The police were called to domestic incidents at the couple’s home, but the allegations were never substantiated and so no one was ever charged.
Wal Chahal
