Sentencing remarks of Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb: R v Zahid Younis
Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
Judgment Date | 07 September 2020 |
Court | Crown Court |
MRS JUSTICE CHEEMA-GRUBB DBE
R v Zahid Younis
Southwark Crown Court
Sentencing Remarks
1. It will surprise no one in this court room that the defendant has
declined to attend his sentence. He sits in the cells below but I will
address these remarks to him so that when he has the courage to read
them he will know exactly why the court reached the conclusions that
it did.
2. Henriett Szucs was aged 32 when you murdered her in November
2016. She was a mother with three children in her native Hungary.
Mihrican Mustafa was aged 37 when you murdered her in May 2018.
She had two children who she saw regularly.
3. Both of these women fell into your orbit when they were at a low ebb
in their lives. Henriett Szucs was in hospital having survived an
attempt on her life by an abusive boyfriend who threw her out of a
fifth-floor window. You were attentive and charming to her. She
thought she could rely on you to take her away from the sadness of
her old life. She made a fatal mistake leaving the place in a safe house
she had been given in Bristol, to move back to London thinking her
new boyfriend, you, would look after her. You knew her history; she
was a fragile and malleable companion. She left behind writings and
drawings she made over the eight or so months she lived with you,
expressing her love for you, her reliance on you and her hope that she
would find a refuge and true happiness with you. But you repaid her
devotion with control, with humiliation and with violence. The marks
you left on her body testify to your remorseless cruelty. What she
wrote at the end, demonstrates her broken spirit.
4. The pathologist could not determine very much about how you had
treated that trusting woman but she had suffered fractures to all but
one of her ribs. The ensuing pain, from two weeks before she died, is
something she would not have been able to hide and yet you told the
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