Killer who hid niece’s body in freezer jailed for 40 years
POLICE and prosecutors missed chances to catch a suspected paedophile who went on to abduct, rape and slit the throats of two women, murdering one of them.
Mujahid Arshid, 38, was given four life sentences and ordered to serve at least 40 years in jail for the murder of Celine Dookhran, his niece, and the rape and kidnapping of both women. Arshid was also convicted of sexually assaulting the surviving victim, who cannot be identified, when she was just 13.
Arshid, a builder, attacked the women at a house he as renovating in Kingston, south-west London. He stuffed the body of 20-year-old Miss Dookhran in a freezer.
But it emerged during his trial that Arshid had been investigated by police four years earlier for disclosing a fantasy to drug and rape the surviving woman in an internet chat with an undercover police officer, investigating paedophilia.
During their explicit exchanges, Arshid posted: “These kind of girls deserve rape – lol.”
Arshid was traced by police and interviewed under caution. But he blamed an employee, who could not be traced, for using his computer and the case was dropped.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) initially believed it could charge Arshid for the 2013 offence but prosecutors changed their minds when neither the laptop nor key witness could be found.
Arshid was obsessed by the surviving victim, but also became fixated by Miss Dookhran, a Barclays Bank employee, when she moved into his home in Mitcham, south London, after her parents tried to keep her apart from her boyfriend.
On July 19 last year, Arshid bound and gagged the women, before wrapping them in dust sheets and driving them to the house he was renovating. He dumped Miss Dookhran’s body in a chest freezer he had installed two days earlier. He slashed the neck of the other woman but she persuaded him not to kill her by lying to him that they could run away together.
In the run-up to the murder, Arshid had carried out internet research on John George Haigh, the so-called “acid bath murderer”, hanged in 1949, suggesting he had planned to dispose of the bodies.
At the Old Bailey, Arshid, who was married, had blamed the surviving victim, claiming she had murdered his niece in a jealous rage after he had consensual sex with both. He had gone on the run but was arrested at a hotel in Folkestone, Kent.
Speaking after the verdict, Iman Nadeem, Miss Dookhran’s mother, said her daughter had fallen “victim to pure evil”. She said: “The disgusting and senseless actions of Mujahid Arshid deprived Celine of a future, a great future, where she could go on to further her ambitions, get married, and perhaps have a family of her own. She will always be in the darkness that surrounds us. I feel that my world has collapsed.”
The family of the surviving victim, who described her attacker as a “psycho”, said: “Mujahid Arshid tried to destroy the life of the surviving victim ever since she met him. He has manipulated and lied repeatedly.”
The court heard that in 2011 the surviving victim had complained to her family that she had been sexually assaulted by Arshid when aged just 13 but Arshid had accused her of lying and had been believed.
After being sentenced, Arshid said: “Can I just say one thing” but Mr Justice Edis, who described him as an “extremely dangerous man”, refused him the platform. Relatives shouted out “paedophile” as Arshid was led away.
Of the failure to charge Arshid over the internet rape allegations in 2013, a CPS spokesman said: “We received the file with the understanding that the suspect was the only one with access to his laptop and therefore it must have been him taking part in the conversation.
“We reviewed the file when we were informed that neither the laptop nor a
‘We were informed that neither the laptop nor a key witness could be located by the police’
key witness could be located by the police. Without those two crucial pieces of evidence, the case did not meet the evidential stage and there would have been no realistic prospect of a conviction. We therefore could not proceed with a prosecution.”
The Metropolitan Police said “all of the evidence at the disposal of the investigating team was reviewed and put to the Crown Prosecution Service, who ultimately made a decision there was insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of a conviction”.
Scotland Yard said it was now reviewing the case to see what lessons could be learned.