Failures let girl, 7, starve to death: She would still be alive if officials had done their job, says judge
Prisoner: Khyra Ishaq was deliberately starved to death by her mother Angela Gordon despite a well-stocked family kitchen
A girl of seven was starved to death by her mother and stepfather after a series of failures by public officials.
Khyra Ishaq was beaten with a cane and allowed to die a slow and agonising death, despite being monitored and visited by at least nine social workers, education officers, teachers and police.
Many of them were simply fobbed off by the girl's calculating mother. They did not even find out that her schizophrenic and brutal stepfather was living in the house.
Yesterday a judge said Khyra - who had lost 40 per cent of her body weight and was just 2st 9lb when she died - would still be alive if they had done their job.
Astonishingly, she had not even been placed on the at risk register - despite concerns from her head teacher that she had been spotted stealing food.
Yesterday it also emerged that:
- Her mother and stepfather exploited a loophole in home education laws to keep her a prisoner in their house without arousing the suspicions of the authorities.
- Her school saw signs of starvation and told social services, who did nothing before eventually relying on a single fleeting glimpse of Khyra to decide she was 'fit and well'.
- None of the 'incompetent' officials who dealt with Khyra's case has been disciplined.
Her mother Angela Gordon, 35, and stepfather Junaid Abuhamza, 30, were convicted of her manslaughter and cruelty to five other children who lived in the house. They will be sentenced next week.
Abuhamza had moved into the house in Handsworth, Birmingham, and introduced a horrific regime of punishment. He believed an evil spirit lurked inside the innocent girl, and had to be beaten, whipped and starved out of her.
Scroll down to watch video reports
Angela Gordon, left, was found not guilty of murdering her daughter Khyra Ishaq. Junaid Abuhamza was Khyra's stepfather. He suffered from schizophrenia and thought the house and Khyra were possessed by an evil spirit
Khyra had been withdrawn from state school by her mother, who told authorities that she would be educated at home.
But court papers said that Khyra's death in May 2008 would 'in all probability' not have happened if there had been 'an adequate initial assessment and proper adherence by the educational welfare services to its guidance'.
In a secret ruling made last year, High Court judge Mrs Justice King said: 'It is beyond belief that, in 2008, in a bustling, energetic and modern city like Birmingham, a child of seven was withdrawn from school and thereafter kept in squalid conditions for a period of five months before finally dying of starvation.'
This photo of a well-stocked fridge at Khyra's family home was shown to jurors as evidence that the child was deliberately starved to death
The kitchen was kept locked with a bolt 'out of reach of the children'
In December 2007, six months before Khyra died, her deputy headmistress phoned social services three times in 24 hours, concerned over her absence after she was spotted stealing food from another pupil's bag.
She went to the house with another teacher but was refused entry.
Two police officers immediately did a 'safe and well' check but - at that stage at least - Khyra appeared 'healthy and clean', even though they were allowed to see her for only ten minutes.
Enlarge 
In January 2008, social worker Ranjit Mann finally visited Khyra. Mrs Mann peered through the letterbox and left a note, only to a get a call from Khyra's paranoid mother threatening to sue.
She passed the case to a colleague and left her post.
Two other social workers - Anne Gondo and Sayna Scott - saw Khyra for just ten minutes on her doorstep and, after an irate call from her mother, recommended closing her file.
Cruelty: Junaid Abuhamza, left, with Gordon in Birmingham Crown Court. The stepfather believed Khyra was possessed by an evil spirit
In February, education assessors Irving Horne and Richard Lewis spent an hour examining a 'sparse' makeshift classroom in the house. They were told she was asleep upstairs after a 'late night' and approved her for home tuition.
By apparently co-operating with the education team, Gordon guaranteed that Khyra would never have to be directly seen by council officials, because the system does not require home schooling assessors to see the children they monitor.
House of horrors: The terraced house in Birmingham where Khyra and five other children lived
The council's social services department - one of the biggest in the country - was last year labelled 'not fit for purpose' following a damning inquiry that exposed inadequate senior managers and staff shortages.
Last night Tony Howell, the council's strategic director for children - who oversaw both departments monitoring Khyra - apologised but rejected calls for his resignation.
A serious case review will investigate Khyra's death.
A fridge bulging with food, but emaciated Khyra had to scavenge for crumbs on the bird table
Forced to stand outside in the freezing cold for hours in only her underwear, seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq made a pitiful sight.
After five months of starvation and beatings she was severely malnourished and covered in scars and bruises - not the happy girl who used to eat her grandmother out of house and home when she went to stay at weekends.
Rubbish and food scraps at the rear of the property. At mealtimes the children were given one bowl containing carrots, beans, eggs and rice, or unsweetened porridge, to share between all of them
Disappointment: Khyra's natural father Ishaq Abuzaire believes the defendants should have been convicted of murder
So when she spied stale breadcrumbs left out on a bird table in the back garden, she took a risk and devoured them.
She knew that the punishment for scavenging food could be a fully clothed cold bath, a night spent in the garden shed or a brutal beating with a bamboo cane.
Khyra's mother 'went mad' over the bread and admonished the neighbour who left it out. Her daughter's punishment was doled out behind closed doors.
The horrific cruelty Khyra suffered in those final months while being kept a prisoner at her home in Handsworth, Birmingham, was revealed after her mother Angela Gordon and stepfather Junaid Abuhamza pleaded guilty to killing the schoolgirl in a 'calculated and deliberate' campaign of abuse.
The house was described as a world 'more like a Victorian workhouse than a semi-detached in Birmingham in the 21st century'.
Abuhamza had started but not finished a series of repairs which left the family with only three usable rooms. One was the kitchen, but while it contained a well-stocked fridge, the door was locked.
Khyra and five other children who lived in the house were fed 'like puppies' from communal bowls.
Yet for most of her tragically short life, Khyra had been an energetic child with a voracious appetite.
Her grandmother Eartha Gordon said: 'She was so lively, a chatterbox. Once she had finished one meal she would ask for another.
'We used to say how come she can eat so much and not put on weight? We used to say she is probably going to be the model of the family.'
Unfit mother: Gordon, pictured in a family video, resisted attempts by welfare workers to visit the home
TIMELINE: HOW KHYRA WAS ALLOWED TO DIE
These are the key dates in the months leading up to the death of Khyra Ishaq, who had lost about 40 per cent of her body weight by the time paramedics were called to her home in May 2008.
December 6, 2007: Khyra is withdrawn from her primary school - where she had a 100 per cent attendance record - by her mother Angela Gordon.
December 19: The deputy headteacher of Khyra's school contacts the children's services department at Birmingham City Council to raise concerns about her welfare. The teacher and a colleague later visited Khyra's home but are not allowed into the property.
January 28, 2008: Khyra's school again contacts social services to raise concerns about whether Gordon is able to meet her daughter's educational needs by teaching her at home. Social worker Ranjit Mann visits their home at 2pm on the same day, but it appears that no one is at the property and she leaves 10-15 minutes later.
January 29-30: Gordon contacts Ms Mann by phone, leaving a message but later refuses to arrange for the social worker to visit the home again.
February 8: Educational social worker Richard Lewis and council mentor Irving Horne visit the home to offer advice on home schooling. Neither official sees any children at the property.
February 21: Birmingham City Council social workers Sanya Scott and Anne Gondo pay a joint, pre-arranged visit to the family but are refused entry to the house. The women decide that they have no concerns for Khyra's well-being after she is brought to meet them at the front door.
March 8: Amandeep Kaur, who lived nearby, sees Khyra - dressed in just her underwear - in the back garden of her home. She was later to tell police that it was a cold morning and the 'abnormally thin' child was whimpering.
April 16: Mr Horne returns to Khyra's home, but there is no answer at the door and he leaves after posting a note through the letterbox.
May 10: According to evidence presented to the court, Khyra's condition would by now have been so severe that it must have been obvious she needed urgent medical attention.
May 17: Khyra is found dying or dead by paramedics called to her home shortly after 6am. She was so thin that her body mass index could not be measured on any available chart. Ambulance service worker Steven Hadlington later likened her emaciated frame to that of a famine victim or a concentration camp survivor.
Then Khyra's regular visits to her grandmother - and nearly all her contact with the outside world - came to a halt.
After her biological father Abu Zaire Ishaq (originally named Delroy Francis) left Gordon for another woman, his friend Abuhamza - real name Samuel Williams - stepped in as a 'Muslim brother' to help with shopping and the school run.
When he moved into the Victorian terrace at 36 Leyton Road in September 2007, Abuhamza decided to teach Khyra and the five other children there what he called 'the Islamic perspective about being dutiful to your parents'.
He used food as a tool to force them to be obedient, starting by abolishing junk food and then reducing meals and even cutting them off altogether.
The decorator became convinced that Khyra's innocent face concealed a jinn - a spirit which Muslims believe can possess humans to take revenge or carry out black magic.
Even as Khyra lay dying, too weak to move or cry out after five months of hunger, he refused to phone an ambulance and instead read the Koran over her frail body to exorcise the evil jinn.
Gordon, who had low self-esteem and depression, helped him rain down punishment after punishment as part of a strict regime of 'discipline'. She told her family that Abuhamza was her 'saviour'.
Then, on May 17, 2008, Khyra lost her fight for life after developing bronchopneumonia and septicaemia brought about by starvation - a common cause of death in concentration camps.
It was a fortnight after her seventh birthday. The 4ft 1in schoolgirl weighed just 2st 9lb, all her ribs were poking through her skin and her face was sunken. Her heart and most of her other internal organs had shrunk.
She had 60 scars and bruises on her skeletal body, 34 of them recent and eight inflicted by a cane. Her hair, once prettily styled in sugar cane rows, was short and balding.
Five months earlier, a teacher had seen Khyra desperately stealing-food from another pupil's bag in the first and only clear sign of her starvation.
Gordon took her and three of the other children out of school soon after on the pretext that Khyra was being bullied for wearing Muslim robes. From then on, visitors and relatives were kept away and the maltreatment escalated.
The children were told they were 'greedy' and locked out of the kitchen, with its tins of sweets, bowls of fruit and packed fridge.
Meals were limited to two a day - breakfast, typically porridge and occasionally fruit, and dinner, often corned beef or chicken, rice or dry bread and sometimes vegetables.
The children were fed in the upstairs bedroom - where all six slept on two mattresses - and ate with their hands from a shared bowl. They drank from a single, shared cup of water.
Gordon, who appeared slim in court, once had a weight problem that saw her balloon to 20st, prompting her to go on a crash diet.
But as a court document put it last year: 'Food was an issue for her and she seemed unable to understand that whilst it may well have been appropriate for her to lose weight, it was certainly not appropriate for these growing children to do the same.'
Sometimes the children were deprived of food altogether if they misbehaved and made to stand in the back garden in all weather for hours or force fed with chocolate spread until they were sick, Birmingham Crown Court heard.
In harrowing police interviews the day after Khyra's death, three of the malnourished children described the punishments.
One, known as Child A, said it was like being inside 'a strict mad house. When we didn't do as we were told we had to miss out on food and were made to stand outside. If we were rude at night we'd have to go in the shed.
'When Khyra stole some bread from the kitchen, Junaid told her, "You've won a prize, you've got a nice treat". He gave her a chocolate jar and told her to eat it all. It made her vomit.'
On other occasions, Khyra was splashed with cold water and made to sleep on the bathroom floor. She became 'like a bone' and 'kept on falling' but 'they'd whack her and she said "ow" ', it was said.
Khyra was discovered at the house after Gordon rang 999 to say her daughter's heart had stopped beating. She was pronounced dead in hospital a short time later. The other children were also emaciated but made a good recovery before being housed with foster carers.
Gordon, a Muslim convert who was born in Birmingham to a family of Jamaican descent, married Mr Ishaq in 1995 after the pair were introduced at a mosque in the city only three days earlier.
For 12 years, she was said to be a 'good mother' to Khyra and the other children in her care. But her marriage broke down after she discovered her husband was having an affair and she turned to Abuhamza.
He had left home at 16 and converted to Islam at 18. At around the time he started abusing Khyra in 2007, he changed his name from Samuel Williams.
A psychiatric assessment suggested he was schizophrenic, while Gordon is said to have developed spiralling depression after he moved in, making her 'unable to function effectively as a mother'.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1253697/Khyra-Ishaq-Mother-Angela-Gordon-guilty-starving-daughter-death.html#ixzz0gbBv7c1g
No comments:
Post a Comment