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[DRAMATIC TUNE] NARRATOR: In early 2016, a 26-year-old Carer and devoted aunt, named Sabah Khan, sat down at her laptop,
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and began to search the internet on how to get away with murder. STEWART CARR: She let her obsession consume her,
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and she was determined to get her sister's husband. And she was willing to go to shocking lengths
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to carry that out. NARRATOR: For four years, Sabah had been having an affair with her sister, Saima's, husband,
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and she wasn't prepared to share him anymore. JO SIDHU: Sabah looked at her sister's life and thought,
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that's what I want. But she couldn't have it. And so she decided to take it for herself.
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NARRATOR: On the 23rd of May 2016, Sabah Khan stabbed her sister at least 68 times.
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Saima was almost decapitated in a vicious attack, that left a river of blood flowing
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through the family home. But in the immediate aftermath, Sabah was captured on camera, blaming everything
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on an unknown intruder. GEOFFREY WANSELL: It's two sisters. It's killing within the family.
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It is Shakespearean in its drama. NARRATOR: Sabah Khan had done the unthinkable,
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and had been unmasked as one of the world's most evil killers. [MUSIC PLAYS] NARRATOR: In October 2017, at the Old Bailey in London,
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England, Sabah Khan pleaded guilty to the murder of her own sister. The 27-year-old Carer, had stabbed Saima Khan to death,
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in a frenzied attack at the home they shared in Luton, Bedfordshire. The violent murder was in stark contrast
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to the seemingly quiet young woman, who was represented in court by Jo Sidhu. JO SIDHU: My first meeting with Sabah Khan as my client,
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took place at the court. I met her in a room. As opposed to being 26, she came across as somebody who
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was perhaps still in her teens. And I got the impression that she was emotionally quite immature.
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She didn't want to say what happened, she clammed up. She knew that there was an ongoing investigation,
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and she simply told me that she was innocent. NARRATOR: By the time of her trial,
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the evidence against Khan was overwhelming. So much so that she had no option but to admit carrying out the brutal murder
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of her own flesh and blood. Journalist, Stewart Carr, watched the drama unfold at the Old Bailey.
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STEWART CARR: I've covered many crime stories, and I've attended many murder trials,
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but the thing that always stands out about the Sabah Khan murder case, is just the sheer personal nature of it.
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This was her sister, this wasn't any random person that she chose to strike the life out of.
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And I always feel a big sadness whenever I look back upon it. I've dealt with many, many murders in my career.
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People who kill each other for money. People who kill in the course of a robbery.
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Sometimes you get cases where parents even kill their own children. But the unique nature of Sabah Khan's murdering of her sister,
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is precisely that. It is extraordinarily rare for a sister to kill her own blood.
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NARRATOR: This killer's story begins in Pakistan. Sabah Khan was born on the 22nd of February 1990,
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the youngest of two daughters. Her family moved to the Netherlands when she was still a child.
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JO SIDHU: Sabah Khan's family was a Pakistani Muslim family that had migrated from Pakistan to Holland,
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and that's where Sabah and her sister were raised. And so she lived a life which hovered
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between a traditional Islamic family and a very westernized environment within Holland.
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DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: This would have been quite a traditional patriarchal household, where
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men are the breadwinners, and women are the nurturers and the caregivers. But Holland is quite a liberal society,
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so there would have been quite a contrast between life at home and life out there in the community.
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JO SIDHU: And so I think the sisters tried to straddle two different worlds. And somehow, they made it work.
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NARRATOR: By the age of 18, Sabah's family had relocated again. This time, across the English Channel.
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JO SIDHU: They made a good life for themselves in Holland, but it was decided at some point,
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that they could have a better life if they shifted to England. So that's the decision that was taken by the parents.
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And they moved both Sabah, Saima, and their brother all together into the place that they had in Luton.
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Luton is one of the most multicultural towns in the UK. And for the most part, the different communities
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live in good harmony. Every part of town has its own identity. NARRATOR: Sabah began studying for a law degree,
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but didn't manage to finish the course. DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: The fact that she didn't complete
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the studies means that she's not able to go on and actually pursue that independence.
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So that dependency on the family unit, the centrality of that institution for her sense of identity, really is
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quite concrete at this point. NARRATOR: Despite an eight year age gap, Sabah and her sister, Saima, were very close.
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STEWART CARR: The two sisters were often seen together. Neighbors would see them going down the street.
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And they both worked as carers, so they had similar lifestyles, similar careers,
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as well as being from the same family. So I think for a lot of people, they were very much
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like two peas in a pod. And indeed the physical similarity between the sisters, was quite striking.
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NARRATOR: But the family dynamic was about to change. As part of an arranged marriage in 2007,
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Saima had wed a taxi driver, named Hafeez Rehman. JO SIDHU: Because Hafeez came from Pakistan
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and he'd never been raised anywhere in Europe, he brought with him much more conservative ideas about what
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the role of women should be. His own wife, he expected to be a mother and a homemaker.
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In fact, Saima had a job, she worked as a Carer looking after elderly people in the local community.
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And Hafeez was OK about her doing that job, as long as she made sure that she looked
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after the house and the kids. NARRATOR: The arrival of Hafeez into the Khan family home,
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had a direct impact on teenage Sabah. JO SIDHU: Sabah, having been raised quite conservatively,
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expected that one day she'd have an arranged marriage of her own. When Hafeez came into the house, this
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was the only outside male that she'd ever interacted with. Here he was, sitting at the dining table,
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sitting in the living room, laughing and joking with her. She took him for what he was meant to be,
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her older brother-in-law, some 10 years her senior. But she was only 18 years old.
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And when his behavior with her became rather more flirtatious, she was flattered.
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EMILY PENNINK: There came a point where Hafeez assumed the role of a man of the house,
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and sort of dominated the family in some respects. And as part of that, he rather took it upon himself
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to form a relationship with Sabah, that he shouldn't have done. NARRATOR: By 2012, the entire family
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were living together under one roof, in a semi-detached house in Luton. Saima Khan was raising a daughter,
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but her husband and her sister had begun an affair. JO SIDHU: I don't know really what Hafeez face expected
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to come of all of this, but there came a point when Sabah was so emotionally attached to him,
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she'd totally fallen in love with him, head over heels. And I think he realized that this wasn't just an affair.
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He now had on his hands a young woman who was obsessed with him. Who wanted him to be with her, and to exclude his wife.
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GEOFFREY WANSELL: Can you imagine what it must have been like in that semi-detached house?
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The emotions that must have been flooding through it. Well, it must have been astonishing.
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NARRATOR: Once so close, the two sisters had suddenly become rivals for the affection of the same man.
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It was all getting too much for 22-year-old Sabah. She not only became less and less emotionally attached
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to her sister, she began to resent her. Because her sister had what Sabah wanted,
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and that was Hafeez. NARRATOR: 22-year-old Sabah Khan's feelings of jealousy towards her sister, Saima,
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were spiraling out of control. But her brother-in-law, Hafeez, had supposedly devised a way around the complicated love triangle.
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After Hafeez started a full blown affair with Sabah Khan under the same roof as his wife and his parents in law,
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he began to have the idea that, why can't I have two wives. He went as far as actually consulting a Muslim priest.
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And asking the imam, would it be possible for me to marry the other sister and take her as a second wife?
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And he was told that under Islamic law, that simply would be unacceptable. NARRATOR: Despite having his plan rejected,
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the affair continued, and Sabah fell pregnant by her brother-in-law. EMILY PENNINK: Hafeez encouraged her quite strenuously
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to have an abortion. She went ahead with it, but I think it was a very, very difficult thing for her,
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because the thing that she wanted most in the world was to have her own family. DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: So everything kind of came
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crashing down at this point. But she still didn't give up on him. And I think this really is testament to the quite low self
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esteem that she had at the time. GEOFFREY WANSELL: She wants everything that her sister has.
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Her husband, her children, everything. She just wants it. And so what had begun as an adolescent crush, developed
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into a full blown sexual affair, now turns into an obsession. NARRATOR: By early 2016, the affair
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had grown even more intense. Sabah had watched on from the sidelines as Hafeez and Saima welcome their fourth child
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into the family home. On the outside, Sabah appeared to be a doting aunt, but inside she was as determined as ever
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to win her brother in law's affections. STEWART CARR: Sabah, we know became increasingly desperate, because she felt
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like she was losing Hafeez. And there's a tone of desperation in some of her text messages.
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We can see she's feeling that he's slipping through her fingers, and she feels certainly
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the need to take some action. JO SIDHU: She started to describe Saima as that bitch,
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in text messages, which she sent to Hafeez. She wanted her sister's life. And the only way she was going to get it,
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is if she could get rid of her sister. NARRATOR: Sabah only grew more frustrated with the situation
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when Hafeez and Saima made an important announcement to the family. STEWART CARR: I think that Sabah had sensed
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that the relationship was starting to wane, and she would soon lose Hafeez. There was talk that Saima and Hafeez
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would move out of the family home, and strike out on their own. And that would, of course, have left Sabah with nothing,
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and she was not prepared to face that. JO SIDHU: That was the trigger. When he announced with his wife that they were planning
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to move out, that meant the end of his relationship with Sabah. And Sabah knew it.
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It was the last straw that broke the camel's back. Hafeez wanted to get away from Sabah,
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but Sabah was so emotionally attached to him, she couldn't contemplate a life in which he
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wasn't the most important part. NARRATOR: While Hafeez and Saima prepared to move out
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of the family home, Sabah had begun to concoct a scheme to erase her love rival from the picture.
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Sibling relationships are the most enduring relationships of our lives. But in this case, Saima wasn't an ally,
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she was a competitor who had to be taken out. JO SIDHU: In her private moments, Sabah began to imagine a world in which she
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could get rid of her sister, and take everything that her sister had. Her husband, and the children.
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And set up a life of her own. But Sabah was not a criminal. Sabah wasn't someone who knew about violence.
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She didn't know how to hurt someone, still less how to kill them. And there she sat on her laptop, googling
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away, thinking of how she might be able to get rid of her sister. And all sorts of bizarre ideas came into her head.
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NARRATOR: The 26-year-old search history revealed some shocking results. GEOFFREY WANSELL: There is a level of fantasy going on
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in Sabah's mind at this point. Literally, breathtaking. I mean, she's also started searching
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the web for poisonous snakes. 16 ways to kill someone and get away with it. How to hire a killer.
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It's beyond bizarre. This is a well brought up young Muslim woman, who is planning to get rid of her sister, her beloved sister.
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Who to all intents and purposes, is someone she's loved from the very beginning of her life.
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It defies belief. It defies common sense. And yet, Sabah kept on, and on. STEWART CARR: We know that she spent 5,000 pounds paying
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a mysterious figure called the Fixer in Pakistan, who dabbled in black magic. We can imagine just how desperate,
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how out of options Sabah must have felt. NARRATOR: In emails to the so-called Fixer,
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Sabah had written in the third person. In one chilling message she wrote, you finish off Saima as quickly as possible,
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so my Sabah can get her Hafeez back. JO SIDHU: Sabah was somebody who did all those things
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because she wants to keep her hands clean, she didn't want blood on her fingers.
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It was only after she realized that none of those options would actually work, that she was left with one option
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on the table, which is that she would have to be the person to get rid of her sister.
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NARRATOR: On the 23rd of May 2016, Sabah Khan saw her chance. She was babysitting her nieces and nephews
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while 34-year-old Saima was at work, and the rest of the family were away from home.
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The family had all gone out to attend a funeral at a local mosque. It was the funeral of a distant relative.
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The mother, the father, her brother, and Hafeez, her brother-in-law, all went to the mosque.
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She knew they'd be out for a while. GEOFFREY WANSELL: Sabah even Google's how long
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do funerals take, to see how long she's got to kill her sister. It is genuinely a plot worthy of a novel.
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This was an opportunity that would never come around again. She texted her sister, Saima, many texts,
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encouraging her to come home. On the pretext that the children were playing up. NARRATOR: Just after 11:00 PM, Saima,
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concerned about her one-year-old daughter, returned home. JO SIDHU: Saima was an ordinary woman,
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leading an ordinary life, who had no idea whatsoever about the devastating act that was going to befall her.
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When she returned home that night, as she'd done 1,000 times before. No doubt she expected she'd put her key in the door,
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open it, and walk through into the hallway. What she didn't realize was that Sabah was waiting for her
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with a knife in her hand. EMILY PENNINK: You can only imagine what she had to face in the hallway.
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Because she would have turned around, and she would have been attacked straight away by a figure
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in a dark hoodie and dark clothes, and carrying a large knife. And she may not have even been able to recognize who
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it was who was attacking her. NARRATOR: In a fit of rage, Sabah Khan repeatedly stabbed her own sister for eight minutes.
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As Sabah carried out this attack in complete darkness, the four children were upstairs.
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Most of them were asleep, and of course, they had no idea that their mother was being brutally murdered
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downstairs by their aunt. DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: I think Sabah is so determined to kill her sister, that is the tunnel vision that she
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has at this point in time. The fact that the children are in the house, I don't think it
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even registers with her, because she is so selfishly pursuing that one goal. STEWART CARR: What's most disturbing of all,
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is that Saima's seven-year-old daughter upstairs, actually heard something of what was going on
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and she shouted down to her aunt. Auntie, are you killing a mouse? Wasn't killing a mouse, she was killing her mother.
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NARRATOR: Sabah Khan's lust for blood was insatiable. In total, Saima suffered at least 68 stab wounds.
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EMILY PENNINK: Her attacker kept on stabbing her, even after it was obvious that she was mortally wounded.
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And the wounds were so horrific, that she was almost decapitated. And one of her hands, I think her right hand,
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had almost been cut clean off in the attack. DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: This is way more violence
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than is actually needed to end somebody's life, and that is very significant. Because what it says, is that it's not
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enough to kill your rival, you have to absolutely destroy them and dehumanize them.
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JO SIDHU: After the violence was over, the body was left there in the hallway, with blood streaming from the wounds.
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And a river-- not just a pool-- of blood going through the floor of that hallway.
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NARRATOR: After murdering her sister in a bloody rage, with four children still upstairs in the family home,
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Sabah Khan calmly began to cover her tracks. DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: She's following through a plan.
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She's not panicking, she's not freaking out, she's actually quite composed at this time,
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because she just sees it as another stage on the journey. JO SIDHU: The first thing she did
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was, she went to the back of the house and smashed the window, to make it look as if a burglar had come into the property.
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Then she went upstairs, and in the spare bedroom, she upturned some boxes of jewelry
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to make it seem as if the house had been ransacked. NARRATOR: With the house looking just as she planned,
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Khan then made herself presentable. JO SIDHU: She then had to change her clothes, because of course,
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stabbing her sister some 68 times, meant that blood had splashed onto her own garments.
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She changed them, bundled them into a bag along with two rubber gloves that she'd
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worn to carry out the killing. And inside that bag, she put the kitchen knife, which
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had been used as the weapon. NARRATOR: Khan hid the bag in her bedroom before finally,
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10 minutes after murdering her sister, making a call. But not to the emergency services.
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EMILY PENNINK: She calls her father. And in a way, she's trying out her story. So she tells him that something's happened,
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that they need to come home. And she starts to sort of formulate the alternative reality that she's trying to spin.
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And then only after she's spoken to her father and practiced what she's going to say,
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she calls for an ambulance. And the ambulance arrive with the police. So she gets the opportunity to actually perform
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the story that she's cooked up. NARRATOR: Sabah Khan's simmering jealousy and resentment
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towards her sister, had boiled over in the most horrific way. Now she would have to appear as the epitome of calm,
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if she was going to get away with murder. JO SIDHU: Soon after the emergency services arrived, Sabah presented to everybody--
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her parents, her brother, the man who became her lover, and of course, the paramedics and the police--
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as somebody who was a grieving sister in shock. She spoke to the police outside the house, and all of it
00:21:21
was filmed on bodycam footage. STEWART CARR: We can see body cam footage from officers,
00:22:06
showing her deliver the performance of her life, really. Where she describes finding her sister, and what a shock
00:22:12
it was. The shock and the surprise on her face, it's not the type of reaction you would
00:22:17
expect from someone who's just found their sister brutally murdered. There's a certain detachment from it.
00:23:10
She's talking very quickly, she's desperate to get her story out there. She's offering a level of detail that they're not asking for.
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She's talking about the mirror being broken, she's talking about blood. So this is her really trying to get a step ahead.
00:23:57
EMILY PENNINK: She seems to be putting on an air of somebody who's almost in shock, who can't quite
00:24:04
understand what's happened. She doesn't really know how her sister managed to be so badly injured.
00:24:14
She doesn't know who might be responsible. And she starts talking about how she tried to save her.
00:24:21
And wrap a scarf around her neck to stem the flow of the blood. JO SIDHU: She had to hold her nerve, all the while knowing
00:24:38
in the back of her mind, but minutes earlier, she had been killing her own sister.
00:24:44
It's an extraordinary situation to find yourself in. And one can only imagine how Sabah Khan got through it
00:24:51
and kept a straight face. STEWART CARR: I think it shows a certain coldness in Sabah's
00:24:55
character, that she could so coldly, and so calculatedly deliver this performance, which was
00:25:01
very precise in its timeline. I mean, she'd certainly covered as many tracks and avenues
00:25:06
as possible, in order to divert suspicion away from herself. NARRATOR: The police investigation
00:25:17
began immediately. Forensic Pathologist, Brett Lockyer, was one of the first people to enter the house.
00:25:24
BRETT LOCKYER: As I walked into the scene, the first thing I saw was obviously there was blood outside.
00:25:28
There was blood on the doorstep. When I went into the hallway, the body of Saima Khan
00:25:33
was lying on the floor, and there were some large pieces of glass on the floor. I was informed by the senior investigating officer,
00:25:40
that the suggestion was that Saima Khan had been the victim of a violent break in.
00:25:45
And as we were processing, and trying to get pieces of evidence or remove items of clothing,
00:25:49
it became more and more apparent about the level of violence that she had been inflicted to.
00:25:55
And I could see straightaway that she had some injuries to her arms, which would suggest
00:25:59
that she put up a struggle. And it was quite an upsetting scene. NARRATOR: Even at this early stage of the investigation,
00:26:08
Brett had his doubts over Sabah Khan's story that a random intruder had killed her sister.
00:26:14
BRETT LOCKYER: It didn't feel that way. Because the suggestion was, by Sabah Khan,
00:26:17
was that she heard her scream from upstairs and that prompted her to come downstairs,
00:26:21
and she found her sister in this way. But the number of injuries that she sustained
00:26:26
didn't fit exactly with that story. Saima Khan had been subjected to a sustained attack,
00:26:32
and that wouldn't have just occurred as a matter of seconds, that would have gone
00:26:35
on for some period of time. And so the suggestion that this was a aggravated robbery which
00:26:40
resulted in her death, didn't quite fit with what I was seeing at the scene. NARRATOR: But in Sabah Khan's mind,
00:26:50
the plan had worked perfectly. Playing the role of the grieving sister, was step one of her twisted agenda.
00:26:58
Her ultimate goal was to have Hafeez all to herself. DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: I do think, that at this point,
00:27:04
Sabah is so fixated, and obsessive, and deluded to an extent, that she really does think that she
00:27:11
can carry this plan through. Because you got to remember, she is quite isolated.
00:27:15
This family is her only reality. She doesn't have any critical voices, any friends
00:27:21
or any colleagues outside, who would call her out on the kind of thoughts and hopes
00:27:26
that she had. So I really do think that she thought she'd get away with this. I think Sabah Khan was purely focused on herself
00:27:35
and on her own needs. I don't think she put any thought into how this would affect the children, her parents, Hafeez.
00:27:45
All she wanted to do was to get rid of her sister. And then from that, she thought everything would be OK.
00:27:52
But clearly, everything was not going to be OK. And she wasn't about to live the life that she'd fantasized
00:28:01
about for all these months. NARRATOR: Meanwhile, Saima Khan's body lay lifeless in a mortuary.
00:28:12
It is impossible to know what would have been going through her mind during the vicious attack,
00:28:18
by her own sister. BRETT LOCKYER: I often do talk to the deceased when I'm doing the postmortems.
00:28:23
As a doctor, you still treat deceased people as people. You know their soul is gone, but the body's still there,
00:28:29
and it's still a physical form. And so talking to Saima, and trying to really empathize as
00:28:34
to what she had been through, I think that we do that naturally as people, not only as forensic pathologists.
00:28:43
It was one of those that will stick with me. NARRATOR: But the police were already
00:28:50
beginning to suspect that Sabah may have had something to do with the attack. A comment captured on the body cam
00:28:57
on the night of Saima's murder, raised their suspicions. BRETT LOCKYER: I didn't believe the story was really
00:29:10
robust enough to explain, not only the severity of the injuries to Saima Khan, but also
00:29:16
to explain the injury that Sabah Khan had to her hand. And so I was very suspicious that that injury to her hand
00:29:23
was actually caused by her wielding the knife into her sister. And that hitting bone and causing the knife to slip,
00:29:29
hence the reason why she had that cut to her hand, and not as a result of her alleged story
00:29:34
that she brushed the piece of glass off the body. NARRATOR: The house remained a crime scene while the police
00:29:41
investigation continued. And the first person detectives wanted to speak to, was the one adult who was present at the time
00:29:49
of Saima Khan's murder. Her sister, Sabah. JO SIDHU: How naive could Sabah have been to think that people
00:29:57
would believe that somebody had come from outside and killed her sister? What would have been their motive?
00:30:03
When she was investigated by the police, she told them that her sister was having an illicit affair.
00:30:08
It was so untrue, but she wanted to lay a false trail so that the police would believe that somebody else might
00:30:13
have a reason for killing her. So whether it was a burglar, or a lover, or somebody else,
00:30:18
Sabah wanted to draw the attention away from herself. NARRATOR: The grieving Khan family
00:30:26
had to be temporarily rehoused. Their home was still an active crime scene. Despite this, life went on as usual for Sabah Khan.
00:30:35
DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: In the week after the murder, Sabah just carries on with life as normal.
00:30:40
Because she's not thinking, I've just killed my sister, how awful. What she's thinking is, I've been successful in getting
00:30:48
my rival out of the way, now let's get onto the next stage in the plan. So she's very calculated, she's very strategic.
00:30:55
She doesn't appear to have any remorse whatsoever. I think she probably thought she'd got away with it.
00:31:00
And she thought that her cover story would hold. We're devoted sisters, we're like two souls in one body,
00:31:07
no one is going to suspect me. NARRATOR: But time was running out for Sabah Khan.
00:31:13
At the end of May 2016, a week after the murder of her 34-year-old sister, Saima, detectives searching
00:31:22
for the killer, made a shocking discovery at the family home in Luton. The killer may have attempted to make Saima's murder appear
00:31:30
as a random attack by an intruder, but this latest breakthrough pointed the finger of suspicion
00:31:36
firmly towards Saima's own sister, Sabah. Sitting upstairs in Sabah Khan's bedroom,
00:31:45
was a plastic bag containing her bloodied clothing with shards of glass from the window,
00:31:50
that she herself had broken. And along with that, rubber gloves that she'd worn to commit the murder.
00:31:56
And indeed, the weapon itself, a bloodstained knife. EMILY PENNINK: I don't think Sabah Khan quite
00:32:03
appreciated what would happen. So she probably thought that at some point, the police would leave and she'd have an opportunity
00:32:13
to get rid of it. But the police were still treating the house as a crime scene, so she really didn't have the chance to dispose of it,
00:32:22
as perhaps she'd thought previously. So she didn't really think it through very well.
00:32:28
GEOFFREY WANSELL: Of course, Sabah becomes the person of the most intense interest to the police.
00:32:33
She is invited for an interrogation. All she says is, I love my sister. And doesn't utter another word.
00:32:42
DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: She was really shocked to have been accused of this crime.
00:32:46
So this is saying you are victimizing me, I am the victim here, isn't this terrible.
00:32:52
And the fact that she offered a no comment interview, showed that she was restricting the amount of information
00:32:58
she gave to police. Because the less that you say, the less that they have to pick over.
00:33:03
So it is quite strategic. NARRATOR: Although she continued to deny it, investigators made the stunning decision
00:33:11
to arrest and charge Sabah Khan with the murder of her own sister. JO SIDHU: One cannot even begin to imagine the nightmare that
00:33:19
Mr. and Mrs. Khan, the parents of the Khan sisters, had to go through. To discover their daughter's body in such a pool of blood
00:33:27
in the hallway of their home, knowing that the grandchildren upstairs had now lost the parent who
00:33:32
was to raise them. And thereafter, to see their younger daughter arrested for the murder of that sister.
00:33:39
The trauma that they would have gone through is unimaginable. NARRATOR: As detectives began to gather more evidence,
00:33:46
CCTV was discovered of Sabah, two days before the murder, purchasing a new knife to cut the cake at her niece's
00:33:55
first birthday party. JO SIDHU: Sabah was sent on this errand, and went to a local Tesco.
00:33:59
And she was filmed there on camera, buying the knife. It was a large, kitchen knife.
00:34:04
She bought it in cash, and brought it back to the family home. That was the weapon that she eventually
00:34:09
used to kill her sister. NARRATOR: Incredibly, there was also CCTV footage from a neighbor's home on the night of Saima's murder,
00:34:18
that captured her coming home from work. JO SIDHU: When the CCTV cameras were discovered by the police
00:34:25
from across the road, it was seen that at 11:07 PM, Saima walked through that door, the lights were switched on.
00:34:33
Within a fraction of a second, they were turned off again. And for the next 8 minutes, that house
00:34:38
was plunged into darkness. It was in those eight minutes that Sabah Khan repeatedly stabbed her sister.
00:34:46
EMILY PENNINK: And the fact that it was on CCTV, that the lights had been turned off and then turned back on again,
00:34:52
is another nail in the coffin of the idea that this was a burglary gone wrong. NARRATOR: Detectives had also uncovered
00:35:04
a motive for the killing. Access to Sabah's mobile phone, revealed that she and Saima's husband, Hafeez, were having an affair.
00:35:14
JO SIDHU: The police presented clear evidence to him, that he had been engaged in an affair for many years
00:35:19
with his sister-in-law. The evidence was there laid bare in their text messages on WhatsApp.
00:35:24
Everyone knew by now what was going on. And so he shifted his position. And he claimed, that actually he had been seduced by Sabah Khan.
00:35:33
That after he'd been seduced, he pretended that in fact, he was forced to continue a sexual relationship with her.
00:35:38
It was laughable. NARRATOR: Despite all the evidence against her, Sabah Khan still protested her innocence
00:35:50
while discussing her upcoming court case with her defense lawyer, Jo Sidhu. JO SIDHU: When you spoke to Sabah,
00:35:57
you didn't get the sense that this is someone who was born wicked. Who had wicked thoughts from childhood, as she was
00:36:03
a teenager, or even in her 20s. This is someone to whom darkness came. She plunged herself into a murky world in which thoughts
00:36:12
were racing through her mind. Evil, wicked thoughts. Things that she would never have entertained in her brain
00:36:18
as she was growing up with her sister, close as they were. This was a transformation of a young woman
00:36:24
who had been a perfect model daughter and sister to her family. And watching that transformation,
00:36:29
looking at Sabah Khan shifting from one person to another, it was like Jekyll and Hyde.
00:36:37
NARRATOR: The defense began to question Sabah Khan's mental health, and the impending court case was delayed
00:36:44
on three separate occasions. EMILY PENNINK: And I think one of the reasons for that,
00:36:48
was that the defense was seeking some psychiatric reports that might give Sabah Khan some sort of a defense,
00:36:57
by explaining that she had perhaps attacked her sister while in the grip of some sort of psychosis.
00:37:05
JO SIDHU: Those investigations into Sabah Khan's mind, produced evidence of a disorder, but it
00:37:11
wasn't strong enough to provide her with a defense to murder. NARRATOR: Sabah Khan had run out of excuses.
00:37:18
JO SIDHU: It was only after the evidence became too much to resist and nothing that she could answer, that she
00:37:23
eventually cracked and admitted to us that she was indeed responsible for killing her sister.
00:37:33
NARRATOR: In October 2017, 17 months after Saima's murder, 27-year-old Sabah Khan's
00:37:41
trial date finally arrived. STEWART CARR: By the time that the fourth trial date had been devised, the case was
00:37:49
all over the national media. Everybody knew about it, and it was no longer a story which
00:37:56
just affected the community. Everyone had an opinion on this woman who was accused
00:38:02
of murdering her sister. And the fact that the trial was later moved to the Old Bailey,
00:38:08
didn't surprise anyone. She came to the court, brought from the prison, stood there in the dock, and the charge of murder
00:38:15
was put to her again. And this time she said the word, guilty. NARRATOR: Sabah's plea was a shock to many onlookers
00:38:27
at the Old Bailey, including Emily Pennink, who was in the courtroom. EMILY PENNINK: We were expecting a trial,
00:38:34
and it came completely out of the blue, as far as I was concerned. Because people don't often plead guilty to murder,
00:38:42
because you're looking at a mandatory life sentence if you do. So it was a shock and a surprise when it happened.
00:38:51
NARRATOR: Sabah Khan's guilty plea meant she would not have to explain herself to anyone, including her grieving
00:38:58
family, in a court of law. JO SIDHU: When the judge imposed life imprisonment on Sabah
00:39:03
Khan, and ordered that she serve a minimum of 22 years behind bars, he knew, of course,
00:39:10
that it wasn't just Sabah who'd be paying the price for this horrific murder. It would be the four children who had lost their mother.
00:39:17
It would be the parents who had lost their daughter. And those same parents who would be visiting Sabah for years
00:39:23
to come as they grew older. So many people were affected by this brutal killing.
00:39:29
And like so many murders, it wouldn't just end with a dead body. GEOFFREY WANSELL: Justice was served
00:39:35
by the imprisonment of Sabah. She should never, ever have had the mistaken idea that she could get away with killing her sister.
00:39:43
But by that time, she was so caught up in this extraordinary obsession with Hafeez,
00:39:49
that she probably said to herself, there's nothing else I can do. It's a dreadful, dreadful story.
00:39:56
NARRATOR: In a statement to the media, Hafeez Rehman said, "The ones who are suffering the most
00:40:01
are my children as they have lost the most important woman in their life, their mother.
00:40:07
They are too young to understand fully what has happened. The pain is harder to bear when the murder of someone
00:40:14
is committed by their own. It leaves you with so many questions which are unanswered."
00:40:22
DR. ELIZABETH YARDLEY: The term that we use to describe a case like this is, sororicide.
00:40:26
This is the killing of a sister. And it's part of a wider crime called siblicide,
00:40:30
the killing of a sibling. Now siblicide is incredibly rare. It's less than 2% of all homicides
00:40:37
are siblings killing siblings. And of that number, only 4% are women killing women.
00:40:44
So an incredibly rare crime. STEWART CARR: From the family's point of view, it must have been extremely traumatic
00:40:50
to have all of these details coming out in the press, in the media. Showing, not only the illicit affair, but just how deranged
00:40:59
and jealous Sabah had become in order to kill her sister. Certainly they've never spoken about it publicly,
00:41:06
and I don't think that they ever will. EMILY PENNINK: It's quite ironic in a way,
00:41:11
that if she had just let things take their course and let the family move out, she could have had the space
00:41:20
to recover and to get her own life, which is what she always wanted. So I think she was sorry that it failed.
00:41:31
Whether she was remorseful at the time, it's really difficult to know. NARRATOR: Sabah Khan is not due for release from prison
00:41:40
until 2039. She will be 49 years old. BRETT LOCKYER: This is one case which does stay with me.
00:41:47
Because during my time with Saima in the mortuary, I did find myself sometimes placing
00:41:53
myself into that position that she would have been in. And I think it becomes more horrific when you understand
00:41:59
that it was her sister that was causing these injuries to her. And I think that the level of fear that must
00:42:05
have gone through her, knowing that it was a family member that was doing this to her.
00:42:09
I mean, that's something that really does stick with you. STEWART CARR: I don't think anyone
00:42:12
will ever forget this murder. The facts of it were just so shocking, that one woman would kill her sister in such a savage way.
00:42:20
Many people will always remember that part of town, and the murder that took place there.
00:42:25
And I think it will be decades really before people stop talking about Sabah Khan.
00:42:35
NARRATOR: The murder of Saima Khan was brutal, bloody, and so unnecessary. Made all the more heartbreaking by the fact
00:42:42
it was committed by her own flesh and blood. No matter the hurt and resentment inside Sabah Khan,
00:42:49
there can be no excuse for her actions. Stabbing her sister to death, while her four
00:42:55
children were upstairs in the family home, is unforgivable. And undoubtedly makes Sabah Khan one of the world's most
00:43:04
evil killers. [MUSIC PLAYS]