Smirking at Britain
Asylum seeker beats wife with hammers – and judge lets him stay
A PAKISTANI asylum seeker who attacked his British wife with hammers when she forgot to cook his dinner has been allowed to stay in the UK.
A drunken Mohsin Akram, 21, beat Mariam Hussain, 20, for an hour while their four-month-old baby slept in the next room.
A court was told the couple met on Facebook in 2013 and married two years later to make it easier for Akram to get a visa. After they wed he subjected her to months of abuse.
He forbade her from leaving their one-bedroom flat alone, confiscated her mobile phone and stopped her using the internet.
Miss Hussain’s ordeal ended in the assault with two hammers in the early hours of last December 24, Cardiff Crown Court heard.
He smashed her Amazon Fire tablet, which was said to be her only link to the outside world.
Miss Hussain managed to escape and begged help from three girls, who hid her in a doorway and called 999. When police arrived they found Akram pacing up and down the street saying he was looking for his wife.
Akram was jailed for 15 months last week after admitting assault. After his trial, it emerged he had been convicted of battery in 2015 for a previous attack on Miss Hussain. That resulted in a community order.
Despite his violent past, a judge chose not to exercise his deportation powers and ruled Akram could stay in the UK.
His defence solicitors claimed he had fled Pakistan after his schizophrenic brother burned down the family home and destroyed a copy of the Koran in the proc- ess. Yesterday Miss Hussain, of Cardiff, criticised the judge’s decision and said her attacker has been allowed to ‘continue life as normal’.
‘The judge could have said he is to be deported but didn’t,’ she said. ‘There are so many reasons why he should be deported. He is an asylum seeker but went out of the country last year. He has the stamps on his passport.
‘The first time we saw each other was in August 2013. At the time his appeal was still in progress, his asylum status had not been granted.’
She suggested that he started pressuring her to enter into a legal partnership to help his case to remain: ‘After we got married in February 2015, that’s when the real abusive relationship started.
‘In May 2015 his tribunal came, I went there and helped him. He presented me as his wife and that he had been in a general relationship with me since 2013, so it looked good.’
The court heard Miss Hussain woke on the night of the attack when Akram returned home drunk and in a rage. Stephen Donoghue, prosecuting, said: ‘He was expecting her to have made him food.
‘He completely lost his temper and started to talk about teaching her a lesson, how to be a good wife. He then picked up one of the hammers and began hitting her.’
Sentencing Akram, Judge Tom Crowther said: ‘You were plainly intoxicated and aggressive. You wanted not a real person but some imaginary figure who not only would bear your children but would constantly dote on you.’
Akram was given a restraining order preventing him from going near Miss Hussain.
‘Teaching her a lesson’