'Count the days before he kills me': Cheadle cabbie wiped out a family - then tried to blame his glamorous wife
17.07.2022 - 19:11
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
One-by-one Rahan Arshad carried his sleeping children downstairs and savagely beat them to death. Eight-year-old Abbas was still wearing his Spiderman pyjamas, Adam, 11, had on an England kit, while daughter Henna was just six-years-old.
Moments earlier Arshad, a taxi driver, had used a rounders bat to murder his semi-naked wife Uzma at their home on Turves Road, Cheadle Hulme. She suffered 23 injuries to her head in the unimaginable attack. Pathologists needed dental records to confirm the identities of the four victims.
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After slaughtering his entire family a blood-spattered Arshad cleaned himself down, scrubbed the bat, hid it in the shed and then packed a bag before fleeing to Thailand. The badly decomposed bodies were not discovered until almost a month later.
Investigating officer Det Supt Martin Bottomley would later describe it as the worst case he had ever dealt with, while Arshad would try to pin the children's murders on his dead wife, before eventually becoming one of the few dozen prisoners in the UK sentenced to a full life term in jail.
Rahan and Uzma were first cousins who wed in an arranged marriage in Pakistan in 1992. After the wedding Uzma joined her husband and lived in Burnage.
Neighbours described a lovely family. Uzma, originally from Lahore in Pakistan, was extremely house-proud and kept her home spotlessly clean.
But it wasn't a happy union. According to Uzma's friends Arshad regularly beat his wife and gave her hardly any money to run the household.
Not long after arriving in Manchester, Uzma started to wear glamorous western clothes, tight tops and jeans, instead of traditional Asian