A jilted husband is facing life in jail after he murdered his mother-in-law in revenge for helping his wife flee their unhappy arranged marriage.

Muhammad Tafham, 31, stabbed Rahman Begum, 46, at her home in Rochdale - and then staged the scene to make it look like suicide.

He denied murder at a Minshull Street Crown Court case, but jurors took just over three hours to convict him.

The court heard that the killing happened the day after the victim’s daughter, Aysha Gulraiz, 25, left Tafham to move back in with her long-term boyfriend and true love in Bradford.

Mrs Begum helped trick the defendant into leaving their home in Clement Royds Street while her daughter returned with her boyfriend, and hurriedly threw her belongings into bin bags and carrier bags before the lovers drove off.

Mrs Begum told her daughter, ‘don’t ruin your life, go live it’, and told her boyfriend, a man named in court only as Malik, ‘look after my daughter’.

The morning after, Tafham realised his wife had left him and went to Mrs Begum’s home, where he stabbed her with severe force in the chest with a 12in blade.

In his defence, Tafham told Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court that mother-of-five Mrs Begum had taken her own life while he visited, and that he fled in panic without raising the alarm.

He claimed he heard a scream from the kitchen while he was in the living room at Clement Royds Street and then discovered Mrs Begum lying face down, turned her body around and pulled the knife from her chest, fearful he would be blamed.

A post-mortem examination found she had suffered three major stab wounds to the front of her body and one of them passed through her breast bone and right through her heart.

Pathologist Dr Charles Wilson told the jury it would have been ‘very difficult’ for Mrs Begum to have done that herself.

Meanwhile, prosecutors dismissed Tafham’s explanation as ‘transparent nonsense’ and the defendant had picked up the kitchen knife in anger to attack his mother-in-law, and then placed the weapon in her hand to make the death appear as suicide.

Aysha Gulraiz entered into an arranged marriage in Pakistan with Tafham, a cousin on her father’s side, in 2013, with him joining her in the UK in 2016.

The court heard the couple needed to live together for three years so Tafham could stay in the country but the pair constantly argued, with Ms Gulraiz eventually asking him for a divorce, which he refused.

Tafham is expected to be sentenced on Wednesday.