A social media influencer and her mother have been found guilty of murdering two men who died when their car was rammed off the road.
Saqib Hussain and Hashim Ijazuddin, both 21, died when the car “split in two” near Leicester in February 2022.
It happened after Mr Hussain threatened to reveal an affair he and Ansreen Bukhari had been having, jurors heard.
Mrs Bukhari, 46, and her influencer daughter Mahek Bukhari were convicted after 28 hours of deliberations.
The TikTok influencer, 24, and her mother, both from Tunstall in Stoke-on-Trent, broke down in tears as the jury’s verdicts were read out.
During the trial, the jury at Leicester Crown Court – which heard that Mr Hussain had threatened to use sexually explicit material to expose the long-running affair – listened to a panicked 999 call he made in the moments before the crash.
The jurors also found fellow defendants Rekhan Karwan and Raees Jamal guilty of the men’s murder. Natasha Akhtar, 23, from Birmingham, Ameer Jamal, 28, and Sanaf Gulamustafa, 23, both from Leicester, were cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter.
Co-accused Mohammed Patel, 21, from Leicester, was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter.
Mahek Bukhari – who has nearly 129,000 followers on TikTok where she posted about fashion and beauty – “set a trap” for Mr Hussain on the night he died, the three-month retrial heard.
Prosecutors said Mr Hussain, from Banbury in Oxfordshire, had been “lured” into meeting with the Bukharis on the pretence he would be given back £3,000 he said he had spent on taking his lover out during their relationship.
Instead, Mr Hussain and Mr Ijazuddin, who had driven his friend to the meeting in a Tesco car park in Hamilton in Leicester as a “favour”, were ambushed and then chased by two cars.
The court was told Mr Ijazuddin’s car split in two and caught fire after hitting a tree at the Six Hills junction on the A46, in the early hours of 11 February 2022.
Karwan, 29, from Leicester, and Jamal, 23, from Loughborough, were driving the vehicles used to pursue the victims.
Source: BBC
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