BID TO FREE CONVICTED
AS a Chief Crown Prosecutor, Nazir Afzal helped jail thousands of criminals – including notorious killers and child sex offenders.
But now, after a 24-year career, the lawyer is focused on DEFENCE in a murder case he claims was a miscarriage of justice.
And he aims to clear a woman he believes was wrongly convicted.
Dentistry student Harmohinder Sanghera – known as Mindy – was jailed for life in 2007 for the killing of 17-year-old Sana Ali.
Mindy, now 35, had been in a two-year relationship with Sana’s husband Sair, unaware he was married and expecting a child.
BLOW
The trial heard that when she found out she took a kitchen knife from her home in Solihull, Birmingham, and drove 115 miles to Sana’s house in Bury, Greater Manchester.
It was claimed she attacked the teenager in a bedroom and stabbed her 43 times – with the fatal blow to her abdomen, killing her unborn baby.
But Mindy told the court she only visited Sana to tell her what kind of man he was. She claimed Sana was fine when she left.
Despite no forensic evidence linking her to the scene, a jury convicted her by 11-1 and she got life with a minimum 14 years.
Mr Afzal studied the case shortly before leaving his role in 2015 – and decided something wasn’t right.
In his book The Prosecutor he wrote: “This was the last case I would explore in detail. This time I wasn’t looking to prosecute, but to see if we had got it wrong.”
Three pieces of evidence made him certain:
When Sana was found dead in a pool of blood after the visit the front door was locked from the INSIDE, so nobody could have left without being let out.
Mindy was seen on CCTV at a petrol station on her way home, looking relaxed and with no signs of being close to someone who had lost so much blood.
Mr Azfal debunks the prosecution claim that Mindy climbed on a cupboard and fled through a tiny kitchen window leaving a footprint on the work surface. And that she wore a paper suit, never found, for the attack.
Mr Afzal said he would have expected blood to be all over Mindy’s clothes, on the cupboard or the window, adding: “I’ve prosecuted hundreds of murders and never has anyone taken a forensic suit along, it beggars belief.
“They also said she climbed out of the window, but the footprint was facing the other way.”
The defence case at the time was that Sana let Mindy out of the house and someone else had murdered her. But Mr Afzal doesn’t believe that either – and claims Sana killed herself.
He points to crime scene analysis that showed she was sat on the edge of her bed bleeding from cuts to her arms. A deep cut to her abdomen indicated that she was sitting and bent over –