Sara Sharif: 10-year-old’s killer father Urfan Sharif injured in prison ambush attack

WARNING: GRAPHIC DETAILS

A killer father who carried out a sadistic years-long campaign of torture on his 10-year-old daughter has been injured in a prison ambush, weeks after he was jailed for her murder.

Urfan Sharif, 43, was behind bars in the Belmarsh Prison, which holds some of the UK’s most dangerous and high-profile criminals, when he was reportedly jumped by two other inmates on New Years Day.

He was slashed on his face and body with the jagged lid of a tuna tin, according to The Sun.

Sharif was jailed for life in December, with a minimum of 40 years, for the murder of his daughter Sara Sharif in August 2023. She was tied up and hooded in a plastic bag and beaten, burnt with an iron, bitten and strangled until her neck broke.

It was the terrible culmination of years of abuse at the hands of Sharif and his wife Beinash Batool.

Batool received 33 years in jail and his brother Faisal Malik got 16 years for causing or allowing Sara’s death.

“Urfan was sliced up badly in his cell by two others who rushed in. It was planned and they used a makeshift weapon — made from the lid of a tin of tuna,” a source told The Sun.

“He was sliced in the neck and face, and is still in healthcare and in a very bad way.

“He was lucky to survive, has had to have stitches and will have scars as a permanent reminder of the attack. The guards tried to keep him safe because he obviously had a target on his back after the case was such big news.

“Something like this was always on the cards, and an attack was probably only a matter of time.”

Police are investigating the attack and have said the injuries from the attack were not life threatening.

The judge who jailed Sharif described his crimes as among the worst any jury had heard.

Mr Justice Cavanagh’s voice trembled as he described the “unimaginable pain, misery and anxiety” Sara must have suffered in the family’s two bedroom home in Woking, Surrey.

Describing the abuse as “nothing short of gruesome”, the High Court judge said: “Sara’s death was the culmination of years of neglect, frequent assaults, and what can only be described as the torture of this small child, mainly, but not entirely, at the hands of her father, Urfan.

“The degree of cruelty involved is almost inconceivable. This happened in plain sight, in front of the rest of the family.

“The courts at the Old Bailey have been witness to many accounts of awful crimes, but few can have been more terrible than the despicable treatment of this poor child that the jury in this case have had to endure.”

— with the Daily Mail