Hunt still on eight years
ALL murders are, by their very nature, shocking. However, few have ever drawn the public’s attention, outrage and fear like the brutal and senseless killing of teenager Aamir Siddiqi at his family home in a leafy area of Cardiff .
The 17-year-old’s murder rocked a nation and triggered a manhunt which, eight years on, still continues.
Ninian Road is a beautiful and wellpresented street in the Roath area. On one side of the street there is the popular Roath Recreation Ground and Pleasure Gardens, with football pitches, tennis courts and a bowling green.
At lunchtime on Sunday, April 11, 2010, people were out enjoying a weekend in the spring sunshine.
On the opposite side of the road there is a long row of three-storey townhouses. Set back from the main road, some have been converted into flats but many still remain large family homes with colourful gardens.
Inside 110 Ninian Road were married couple Iqbal and Parveen Ahmad, then aged 68 and 55 respectively.
Upstairs, their son Aamir Siddiqi was working on his A-levels. This was not unusual.
Passionate sportsman Aamir had been accepted into Cardiff Law School and was a well liked and diligent student. The talented teenager was awaiting the arrival of a local imam, who was going to deliver a Koran lesson.
There was a knock at the door and Aamir’s mother saw the outline of a man through the glass. He was putting on what seemed to be a piece of square cloth over his shoulder.
Assuming his teacher had arrived, Mrs Ahmad called to Aamir asking him to open the door for the imam. But it was not a piece of cloth – it was a balaclava.
As soon as Aamir opened the door, two men attacked him with daggers. They were described by Aamir’s dad as “howling” like animals as they stabbed Aamir multiple times in the torso.
Mr Ahmad, who had undergone a knee replacement operation not long before the attack, bravely used all of his energy to take hold of one of the pair’s hands and pin him against a wall with his head against his chest.
However, during a later trial, he said the man was too strong for him and had slashed him twice before running off.
Meanwhile, Aamir’s mum had jumped on the back of the other attacker, who by this time had chased Aamir into the dining room.
The two men fled the scene and made off in what turned out to be a stolen Volvo.
Mrs Ahmad ran out into the street screaming for someone to help.
Two young girls heard Mrs Ahmad’s calls and they ran up to passer-by Ian Nurse and begged him to see what was wrong.
When Mr Nurse arrived on the doorstep of the family house Aamir’s mother emerged, crying out the only words she could muster: “Help” and “stab”.
Inside, Mr Nurse saw Aamir’s legs protruding into the hallway from a side room and he knelt beside the teenager’s body to check his pulse.
“There was nothing at all,” he would later tell Swansea Crown Court .
Minutes later, DS Stuart Wales, a senior detective who had heard the call for help on his police radio, arrived at the house. He could see Mrs Ahmad at the window.
“The net curtain of the window flung back and I didn’t expect it to,” he would later describe in court.
“I looked to the right and I saw the face of Aamir’s mum – she looked absolutely traumatised. It’s still an image quite clear in my mind.”
During a 20-minute wait for an ambulance to take Aamir to the nearby University Hospital of Wales, Sergeant Kee Wong performed CPR on him.Despite these efforts he died of his wounds.
DS Wales reported to the court: “I’ve 17 years of police service and, there’s no doubt about it, it was the most distressing incident I’ve ever had to attend.”
Both parents had been stabbed in the chest, head and arms as they fought to protect their son.
The murder shocked not just the city but the whole of the UK.
The city was gripped by the search for those responsible.
What terrified the public was not just the brutality of the murder but also the lack of any clear motive.
Cardiff University issued safety advice to its students and there was a heavy police presence in the Cathays and Roath areas.
In a press conference detectives moved to reassure the public that “Cardiff does remain a safe city” and that this was an “isolated incident”.
When quizzed about possible motives, the officers said: “We have no motives at this stage. Aamir was an upstanding member of the community, he was loved by his family and was well respected. It is clearly a hypothesis that he was mistakenly targeted. You have to keep an open mind.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Aamir’s parents, three sisters, extended family and friends made repeated appeals to the public for help to find their “precious” boy’s killers.
With her parents at first too distraught to speak publicly, Aamir’s sister Nishat stepped in to tell a press conference at Cardiff Central police station that her little brother was “a friend” and “something precious that we will miss”.
Police issued descriptions of two men they wanted to speak to. A £10,000 reward was offered, and calls flooded in to the BBC’s Crimewatch programme.
Rumours swirled as to who was behind the attack. These intensified when the T&A stores shop in Salisbury Road in Cathays was cordoned off for several days, as forensic experts searched for clues.
They were following a tip from the owner of the store – father of two Zaid Akbar. He had trawled through hours of CCTV footage after his mother Sarwar Noor, then 70, recognised descriptions of the men reported in the South Wales Echo.
Speaking at the time, he said: “I was reading an article in the South Wales Echo and a description of these people was detailed in that. I read it out and my mum said it sounded like similar people who came into the shop.”
Sarwar told Zaid that the two men had asked for tape and gloves before leaving with only a packet of cigarettes.
Zaid gave this intelligence to the authorities and, days later, Ben Hope, 39, and Jason Richards, 38, were arrested by South Wales Police.
The pair seemed to have no relation to Aamir and his family. While Mr and Mrs Ahmad and their children were respected and well liked, Richards operated in the city’s underworld.
He met co-defendant Ben Hope in prison and they went on to have