Sabina had this distinctive laugh – even if we heard her laugh from another room we could tell it was her. She was very much a fitness fanatic. Every morning, I would come downstairs, and she would be eating avocado and boiled eggs. Sometimes, I wake up and expect her to still be standing there, boiling her eggs… then I remember.
The last time I saw her was at my parents’ house towards the end of the summer holidays. There are four of us sisters altogether. I am the eldest, and then there was Sabina. There were only 11 months between us, but I was still very protective of her. I saw her as my baby sister, and we were incredibly close. She loved being an auntie and enjoyed spending time with my kids, who were five and 10 months old that last time they sat playing with Sabina. This was before she got caught up in the whirlwind of lesson planning and activities. She taught the Year Ones; it was her second year and she was passionate about her job. She saw the kids in her class as her babies and would tell us all the sweet things they did. She wanted to make a difference to their lives, and it was great to see her flourishing in her career. She was very much an independent woman who would always stand up for her rights and the rights of those around her.
The morning of 19 September was a quiet Sunday like any other. I was busy with the girls when my husband suddenly rushed out of the room on his phone. I realised he was talking to one of my sisters. Odd. It wasn’t like her to call him instead of me. I checked my phone and saw a missed call from her. Obviously, when I didn’t answer, she had rung him, and that’s when I realised something was wrong. My mind was racing – I thought something had happened to one of my parents. I could tell from his tone of voice that it was serious.
I kept asking him what had happened, while he was trying to listen and process what she was saying. After the call, he sat me down and said, ‘Something has happened to Sabina.’ I couldn’t believe it. I had only spoken to her the other day! I began sobbing. ‘It’s a lie,’ I said. ‘They’ve got it wrong.’ We got straight into the car and drove to my mum’s house, an hour away. My head was going 500 miles per hour, trying to process what was happening. As we sat in traffic, I got increasingly angry and frustrated. I was impatient to just get to my mum’s and for someone to tell me there had been a mistake. Sabina was okay and was just out shopping, or meeting friends.
I scrolled constantly on my phone, desperately searching for anything I could find. When a headline came up saying the body of a young woman had been found in Kidbrooke, I gasped, my heart thumping wildly against my chest. ‘Mummy, what’s wrong?’ my daughter kept asking from the back seat. She looked so tiny and bewildered, while her baby sister slept beside her. Even though inside I was breaking into pieces, I had to keep it together for them. My husband took my phone from my hand. ‘Stop torturing yourself like this,’ he said.
The police were already there when we got to my mum’s, but they couldn’t tell us much. ‘You have to wait for the detectives,’ one of the officers said. Waiting for those detectives was the longest wait of my life. I was twisting the corner of my scarf over and over, praying, ‘Please let Sabina be okay.’ When they finally arrived, they told us Sabina had been attacked five minutes away from her home, in the local park. Her body was found the next day by someone walking their dog, just yards from the path where she had been walking, barely concealed by a layer of leaves. It didn’t make sense; I’d been to that park and it was full of families and kids. She walked through it all the time.
Everyone's clicking on...
I collapsed on to the floor, sobbing, but even then, it didn’t feel real; like I was in a bad dream from which I couldn’t wake up. ‘We are doing everything we can to find her killer,’ the detectives assured us. We knew it wouldn’t bring her back, but, at least we would get some answers and, hopefully, some justice.
Shock waves
Sabina’s death didn’t just impact us, it sent shock waves around the community. Annie Gibbs got in touch from our nearby residents’ organisation, the Kidbrooke Community, and suggested organising a vigil a week later. Annie also runs Amour Destiné CIC, a local charity supporting women of colour who are survivors of domestic abuse and violence, so she had seen first-hand the impact of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG). I am quite a private person, but I knew it had to be done. I wanted to show that Sabina wasn’t just a nameless statistic, and that she was a person who was loved.
The vigil in Pegler Square, just by the park where she was killed, was a sea of people of all backgrounds, with flowers and placards everywhere. There were even people coming out on to their balconies in the flats around the square with candles lit. The unity and love from all these people who didn’t even know Sabina, coming together and grieving for her, was a beautiful thing. It made me realise we were not alone.
Yet, while we felt this incredible surge of support from our community, I was struck by the lack of support from the government. I couldn’t help but feel that if Sabina was white, she would have been treated differently.
The same was true of the media. The weeks after Sabina’s murder were the cruellest, waiting. I was on a knife edge, hoping for developments, and we knew the longer the investigation took, the harder it would get. The police were appealing for witnesses – yet every time I opened up the news there was hardly anything about my sister.
When the Sarah Everard case happened six months earlier, it was all over the news. Kate Middleton even went to the vigil. What happened to Sarah was horrific and I am in no way downplaying that, but why wasn’t my sister treated the same way? Why didn’t my sister get front pages and headlines? If Kate Middleton was able to attend the vigil for Sarah, why couldn’t she attend the vigil for Sabina? They were both young women at the start of their lives who were brutally murdered by evil men. So why weren’t they treated equally? Was it because of the colour of Sabina’s skin? Our religion? People may say I’m using the race card, but if you’re in that situation and you’re experiencing it, then you’ll see a different picture. If we were a ‘normal’, white British family, it would have been different. We shouldn’t have those divisions in society.
When articles did eventually come out, the racial stereotypes that surround Muslim women seeped through every line. They would speak about what she was wearing and potential motives while, over on social media, people speculated that her death could have been an honour killing. They knew nothing about Sabina or our family; all they knew is that she was Asian.
The aftermath
Nine days after her body was found, the police arrested a 36-year-old garage worker, Koci Selamaj, who had a history of violence and domestic abuse. He hadn’t even known Sabina, he just wanted to kill a woman and she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The court case started in December 2021. I sat in silence at the Old Bailey with my family. I stared at Selamaj in the box, willing him to look me in the eyes, but he faced the other way.
When the judge asked him how he pleaded, to my horror, he said, ‘Not guilty.’ (He later changed his plea to guilty.) I was furious. There was concrete evidence of the attack, including CCTV, and the police had found the weapon and blood splatter that linked him to her murder.
The trial began in February 2022, and lasted four months. But the next two times we went to court, Selamaj didn’t even bother turning up. I couldn’t get my head around it. Are you telling me that the judge, the lawyers, the prison officers have no power to bring him to court? He gets to stay in his cell, while we’re here listening to everything he did to my sister. How is that okay?
The end of the trial was very intense, as the lawyers described everything he did in clinical detail. It felt like my sister was a piece of evidence instead of a person who was loved and cared for.
When the CCTV footage was shown, we left the courtroom because I didn’t want my last memory of Sabina to be the images of her being struck on the head and bleeding on the cold, hard ground. But I had to sit there and listen to them describe in detail how he hit her on the head 34 times with a heavy metal instrument.
Halfway through, he pulled her head up by her hair to see if she was still conscious, then dragged her up the hill before hiding her body under a pile of leaves. Those words echo through my head to this day. I can’t get them out. In April 2022, Selamaj was jailed for life, with a minimum term of 36 years, for what the judge described as a ‘predatory and sexually motivated’ attack.
Sabina’s legacy
Before my sister’s murder, I didn’t have a clue about the legal system. I work in a special needs school and all I knew was what I saw on Law & Order. I was shocked at how outdated the justice system is. Instead of centring the victim and families, it’s like we are just an afterthought.
On the day of Selamaj’s sentencing, I had our witness impact statement ready. But the barrister told us Selamaj had refused to come to court to hear it. And under the law, he had the right to do so. Nor did he listen by video link. That was the final straw. Not only was it cowardly, it gave him power over us. I had to listen to every detail of what he did to Sabina, but he didn’t have to hear what we had to say. How is that fair? How can we have closure when we never got the chance to confront him and tell him what he had done to us?
This man had taken my sister’s life, her rights, her future, yet he had the right to ignore, and not listen to, the very people his crime impacted the most. I knew it needed to change. That’s why I started my campaign for ‘Sabina’s Law’ in April 2022. Under this law, people who commit serious crimes such as rape and murder would have to come to the sentence hearing and face what they’ve done. If they don’t, they could face an extra two years in prison. People may think, ‘He’s got a life sentence, what’s an additional two years?’ but if you went through what we went through, you would understand it means a lot.
The Victims and Courts Bill has been through two readings in parliament, which means that MPs agree with the principle of the law but are debating the details.
Fighting for this change in the law has been a double-edged sword. Sabina will always be in my heart, and this process has meant I can do something constructive to help others; it’s given me focus. But it can be painful, too. Sometimes, just when I feel I’m getting my life back together, I’ll get a notification updating me on developments, such as the second reading of the bill. You think, ‘Okay, this is amazing,’ but then you’re triggered by the trauma that you’ve gone through to get to where you are now. But I had to do it for Sabina.
With this new law in place, I’m hoping that it will help victims’ families feel their voices are heard. There are hundreds of women like Sabina, whose lives are stolen from them for no other reason than because they are women. There are so many families like ours who are left living under the shadow of that grief.
We need to educate boys from when they are young about misogyny and violence against women. We can’t just say it’s because of Andrew Tate. Though he is accused of doing appalling things, he’s just one man. We need to see the bigger picture, and the government isn’t doing enough. VAWG isn’t a priority. There needs to be more funding to protect women, not just big charities but smaller ones, such as Amour Destiné CIC. As for me and my family, every year, we grow sunflowers. Sabina loved them and I can see why, every time they bloom. Sunflowers symbolise everything she was to us, standing strong and tall and golden. And that’s how I want to remember her.
