Sabah Khan, 27, pleaded guilty to frenzied stabbing of her sister – with whose husband she was having an affair

A woman has been jailed for life with a minimum term of 22 years after admitting the frenzied murder of her sister, with whom she lived and with whose husband she was having an affair.

Sabah Khan, 27, stabbed 34-year-old Saima Khan, a care worker, at least 68 times after luring her home from work on the evening of 23 May 2016, while their parents and Saima’s husband were at a funeral.

As Saima’s four children lay in their beds, Sabah repeatedly plunged a kitchen knife into their mother, with one blow penetrating all the way through her neck and severing her carotid arteries and jugular vein. Her screams could be heard by their neighbours on Overstone Road in Luton, Bedfordshire.

The court heard how in the midst of the attack Saima’s eldest daughter had called out to ask Sabah whether she was killing their mum. In response Sabah shouted to them to stay upstairs. She then smashed a window and concealed the recently purchased murder weapon and the black, blood-stained clothing she had worn to carry out the killing in bin liners, before calling her parents and emergency services, claiming her sister had been the victim of a burglary gone wrong.

Sabah pleaded guilty to murder in a brief hearing at the Old Bailey in London on Tuesday. In the same court for sentencing on Thursday, it emerged she had grown increasingly desperate after an affair with Saima’s husband, Hafeez Rehman, 37, which had begun years earlier, turned sour to the point where they had arranged to be rehoused away from the family home.

In WhatsApp messages between Sabah and Rehman read out in court, the defendant described her sister as a “bitch” and accused Rehman of marrying her for the sole purpose of obtaining a passport. The relationship, it emerged, was tempestuous, with Rehman using his phone’s blocking feature to stop Sabah from sending him messages.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The knife used by Sabah Khan to kill her sister. Photograph: Bedfordshire police

Jane Bickerstaff QC, for the Crown Prosecution Service, told the court how the affair between Sabah and Rehman had been kept secret from Saima, although he had made inquiries as to whether Islamic law allowed him to marry both sisters.

In Rehman’s statements to police, he accused Sabah of instigating the affair, and said that although he had wanted to break it off, Sabah had threatened to harm herself if he did so. One message from Sabah to Rehman said: “Nothing in the world can change my feelings for you, not even you; no matter how bad you treat me it won’t change anything. Day by day my love gets stronger.”

Three months before killing Saima, Sabah began researching methods of committing murder on the internet, including searches for where to buy poisonous snakes and viewing a page entitled “16 steps to kill someone and not get caught”.

“There are a number of searches that go on to look at different types of ways to kill someone ... these are interspersed with looking at the Facebook page of Hafeez Rehman and searches as to whether falling in love is allowed in Islam,” Bickerstaff said.

Messages retrieved during the police investigation revealed that from at least March 2016 Sabah was in touch with a black magician in Pakistan, who she paid £5,000 to cast a spell that would kill Saima. Although the messages were sent in the third person it was established that Sabah sent them. “You finish off Saima as quickly as possible so my Sabah can get her Hafeez back,” said one.

On the night of the killing, Saima had been working as a carer for an elderly woman, while Sabah looked after her children while Rehman and the sisters’ parents, with whom they also lived, went to a funeral. Taking advantage of their absence, Sabah sent four text messages to her sister saying her youngest daughter, who had just turned one, was crying and needed her mother.

A neighbour’s CCTV showed Saima entering the front door of their home at 11.07pm and turning the hall light on. Forty-five seconds later it was turned off and the hallway remained in darkness for just over eight minutes – the period in which she was murdered, the prosecution said. At 11.25pm, Sabah rang her parents, having already changed clothes and concealed the murder weapon.

In mitigation, Jo Sidhu QC said Rehman’s claims that Sabah had been the driving force behind their affair were untrue. He said that despite Rehman’s claims to have tried to end the relationship, it had remained sexual until days before Sabah murdered her sister, and Rehman had warned off another suitor who had developed a relationship with her. In 2012, Sabah had a termination after she became pregnant by Rehman, who refused to wear contraception during their sexual encounters, Sidhu said.



Sabah wept in the dock as details of her relationship with Rehman were read out in court.



“It’s part of this defendant’s mitigation that the instigation of this relationship was at the behest of an older man – a decade older,” he said, adding that not only was Sabah much younger in age, but had also been assessed as in the low-average range of intelligence.

“It brewed and it festered and in the end she [Sabah] made the decision that her sister had to go, and she will live with that for the rest of her life.”

DCI Adam Gallop, the senior investigating officer in the case, said: “This was a brutal act of jealousy. It was not a case of honour killing, nor was this the burglary that Sabah Khan tried so hard to create. Sabah wanted her sister’s life. She wanted her children and her husband. Hearing the news that they were planning to leave the family home together was the final straw and she took her sister’s life in a bitter envy.”