Uber driver smothered children with petrol-soaked rag then set home ablaze
AN Uber driver who smothered his two children with a petrol-soaked cloth and tried to blow up his wife was jailed for life yesterday.
Endris Mohammed, 47, murdered his son Saros, eight, and daughter Leanor, six, before setting fire to the family home to try to kill his wife as she slept.
The Uber driver, an Ethiopian refugee who was granted asylum in 2006, was then badly burnt as he set fire to his car in an apparent suicide attempt.
Passing sentence yesterday, Mr Justice Andrew Gilbart told the father – who appeared in court with bandages on his head – that the safe haven he had built in the UK with his wife was ‘destroyed by you in the most appalling manner imaginable’.
Mohammed murdered his son and daughter at 3.30am on October 28 last year while they were having a ‘sleepover’ in the lounge of their home in Birmingham.
Jurors heard Mohammed, who met his wife Penil Teklehaimanot in 2006 in Kent, had earlier removed a cooker from a kitchen unit and stabbed a pipe so that ‘the gas would escape and an explosion would occur’.
He started a fire near the front door but when he realised his explosion plot had failed he drove 40 miles in his Uber car before setting fire to it in Newcastleunder-Lyme, Staffordshire.
Passers-by spotted the burning vehicle and called emergency services, who took Mohammed to hospital with severe burns.
His wife was woken at home by a fire alarm and managed to put out the blaze with her bare feet and hands before dragging her children outside. She believed they were asleep but they were in cardiac arrest and were pronounced dead within a minute of each other at hospital.
She told the court Mohammed was ‘a gentle, quiet man’ who had not seemed angry or irritable in the months before her children were killed. In a victim impact statement read out in court, she said: ‘Losing Saros and Leanor left a gap in my life that will never be filled. It is an indescribable pain to lose lives ... in such a brutal manner – there is no bigger pain in this world than this experience.’
Mohammed denied two charges of murder and one of attempted murder, claiming diminished responsibility caused by a depressive disorder and money worries. But a consultant psychiatrist told the court he had been thinking ‘rationally’. The judge accepted Mohammed had a depressive illness falling short of diminished responsibility but said a withdrawal from a cash machine hours earlier showed he had not intended suicide.
Inquiries also found the family’s finances were stable.
Mohammed, who was found guilty at Birmingham Crown Court on Friday, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 33 years and given a concurrent tenyear sentence for the attempted murder of his wife.