Famous TikTok blogger 24-year-old Englishwoman Mahek Buhari and her mother are accused of murder after a fatal accident on a highway in Leicestershire (England). But not everything is so simple.
Self-obsessed Mahek Bukhari has over 120,000 followers on TikTok and 43,000 on Instagram, where she has posed for popular brands like Rebellious Fashion and filmed makeup tutorials. Now she will have to spend the rest of her life in prison – the court sentenced her to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 31 years and eight months. Her mother, Ansrin Bukhari, is the managing director of security firm City Security Plus in Stoke-on-Trent. She was sentenced to a minimum term of 26 years and nine months.
A three-month legal battle at Leicester Crown Court found that the couple were part of a group that lured the victims into a Tesco car park last February and then chased them at 100 miles per hour. Saqib Hussain and Mohammed Hashim Ijazuddin, 21, from Banbury in Oxfordshire, died instantly when their car went off the road, crashed into a tree and caught fire. writes Guardian.
The co-defendants, 29-year-old Rehan Karvan and 23-year-old Rais Jamal, were also sentenced to life imprisonment with minimum terms of 26 years, 10 months and 31 years, respectively, on two counts of murder.
Natasha Akhtar, 23, was jailed for 11 years and eight months, while Amir Jamal, 28, and Sanaf Ghulamustafa, 23, received 14 years, eight months and 14 years, nine months, respectively, on two counts of manslaughter.
The court found that the mother of TikTok star Ansrin Buhari was “turned to the head” by the “perceived glamor” of the world of influencers. “A world far removed from the life you lived before as a mother and housewife in Stoke-on-Trent,” the judge said. This led to her having an affair with Saqib Hussain. She later attempted to end the relationship, to which Hussain reacted negatively by threatening to send sexually explicit photos to her husband unless she returned the £3,000 he claimed he had spent on her.
Early on the morning of February 11 last year, Mahek Buhari arranged to meet Hussain in a car park in Leicester on the pretext of giving him money, and arrived there as part of a group of eight people. Many were wearing protective masks and at least one person carried a weapon.
When Hussain and his close friend Ijazuddin, who offered to give him a ride, arrived at the parking lot and saw these people, they quickly turned around and drove away, and the group pursued them at high speed, which led to a fatal accident and the death of young people – their car went off the road crashed into a tree and caught fire. Before his death, Hussein managed to call 999 and said: “Guys are chasing me. They have balaclavas on. They’re trying to knock me out of the way. They’re trying to kill me – I’ll die.”
In sentencing Friday afternoon, Judge Timothy Spencer called the call “one of the most touching and disturbing pieces of evidence ever heard in a criminal court.” He noted: “Ijazuddin was completely innocent and was caught up in the deadly maelstrom caused by all of you in the dock.”
He also noted that Mahek Buhari’s “tasteless fame” in her influencer career made her “completely self-obsessed”:
“At the core are TikTok and Instagram. That’s why you, Mahek, dropped out of university. If you hadn’t, you’d be a young graduate now with your whole life ahead of you. Now you will spend all your best years in prison.”
In a statement read in court, Ijazuddin’s father Sikandar Hayat said, “My heart has been torn out and none of us will be the same again. All we have left are the memories of our beloved son. They left him and his friend to burn in the furnace of hell.”
Judge Spencer said that none of the defendants sought help after the crash, they were only concerned with an attempt to “evade responsibility”: “Therefore, although some express remorse, it is small, belated and empty.”
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