Father ‘forced daughter to sign contract promising not to get fat’
A FITNESS-MAD father made his daughter sign a contract promising she would never get fat and weighed her almost daily, a court was told.
Rachid Khadla, 56, strangled and beat his younger son with a spoon and punched the older boy so hard ‘he fell to the ground’, jurors heard.
The three children were allegedly banned from watching ‘anything happy’ on TV and lived in fear of being beaten up.
Khadla is facing charges of child cruelty and assault over his treatment of his daughter Amira and sons Hicham and Karim, who are now all adults.
Alex Krikler, prosecuting, told Reading Crown Court that in 2012 Khadla made his daughter, now 23, sign a document which
‘I told no one for fear of him’
said: ‘I, Amira Khadla, will never let myself get fat. I will do lots of exercise to make sure I will never get fat, even until I die.’
Mr Krikler added: ‘The defendant was very conscious about his own fitness and diet, regularly attending the gym and eating healthily.
‘In fact, all the children would be regularly weighed by the defendant to make sure that they had not put on weight.’
Amira told the court her father had thrown a chair at her when she was nine then told doctors that the lump behind her ear had been caused by a football.
He confiscated her bank card, and would not let her move out of the family home in Windsor, Berkshire, until she married.
Karim, 26, claimed his father had punched him so hard when he was 15 that he was knocked to the ground.
The court heard that Khadla had beaten Hicham, 18, more than 100 times with a wooden spoon and strangled him in October 2019 for being slow at his household chores.
Mr Krikler said Khadla ‘placed both hands around his neck and strangled him for quite some time, five to 10 seconds’. The teenager had been unable to speak or breathe during the ‘extremely frightening’ attack.
The next day he showed two school friends his bruises and they went with him to their head of sixth form.
Khadla was arrested on suspicion of assault the next day.
Philip Rowlands, defending, said that if Amira and her siblings had truly been in fear of their father they would have taken action earlier. She responded: ‘When you are manipulated and brainwashed by your own father, you are made to keep quiet. I never told anyone for fear of him.
‘He would beat us up because we had done something wrong. It was safer to stay silent.’
Khadla denies three counts of child cruelty and two of assault. His wife of 27 years, Sarah, did not intervene but supported the prosecution against her ‘quicktempered’ husband.
The trial continues.