CONTENT WARNING: This article contains details that may be distressing to some readers.
UK-based lifestyle and beauty TikToker Mahek Bukhari and her mum Ansreen Bukhari have been found guilty of killing the mother’s younger lover after he threatened to expose intimate images and video to her husband.
24-year-old Mahek and her 47-year-old mum Ansreen are well known on TikTok for frequently posting videos together on Bukhari’s account, which has over 130,000 followers.
As reported by Sky News, both Mahek and Ansreen were found guilty of the February 2022 murders of Ansreen’s 21-year-old lover Saqib Hussain and his friend Mohammed Hashim Ijazuddin, also 21.
In January 2022, Ansreen tried to end her relationship with Hussain but their text messages, which were shared with the court, showed he was not willing to give up on the relationship.
It’s unclear when the affair between Ansreen and Hussain began, but Mahek was said to be the only other person aware of the affair at the time.
Ansreen trying to end the affair allegedly led to Hussain threatening to share sexually explicit images and videos of Ansreen with her husband and son.
A WhatsApp message sent by Mahek Bukhari from around this time reads, “I’ll soon get him jumped by guys and he won’t know what day it is.”
Ansreen and Mahek arranged to pay Hussain a sum of about £3000 ($5800 AUD)—the amount which Hussain claimed he had spent during the course of their affair—to stop him from sharing the private images and videos.
Communications between the two women confirm that even after payment, they remained concerned that they wouldn’t be ever be able to confirm Hussain had completely deleted the images and that he no longer had access to them.
The pair arranged to meet Hussain at a location in the UK city of Leicester, promising to give him the money at the meeting.
Ahead of the meeting, Mahek invited her friend Rekan Karwan and a group of his friends to come to the meeting to try to force Hussain to give up his phone and delete the photos.
At the meeting spot, Hussain and his friend Mohammed Hashim Ijazuddin who had accompanied him to the meet, never got out of his car, as they were suspicious of the overall circumstances.
As Hussain and Ijazuddin drove away from the car park, two cars driven by Karwan and his friend Raees Jamal followed in close pursuit.
Bukhari and her mother were both in the cars that were following Hussain.
In Hussain’s final moments he called 999 (the UK equivalent to 000) and told the operator: “I’m being followed by two vehicles. They’re trying to block me in. They’ve got balaclavas on. They’re trying to ram me off the road.”
“They’re trying to kill me. I’m going to die… Please sir, I just need help. They’re hitting the back of the car, really fast… Please I’m begging you. I’m going to die.”
Almost immediately after this interaction with the operator, screams and a collision can be heard before the call abruptly ends.
The two men were driven off the road, with the court hearing that their car “split in half” and caught fire when it crashed into a tree.
Prosecutors in the case say that after driving the two men off the road, “none of the defendants made any attempt to help the victims or to call for help.”
Leicestershire Police’s senior investigating officer in the case, Detective Inspector Mark Parish, said: “Instead they drove on and then even drove back past the collision site.”
Parish read in a statement that: “lies were continually told in order to try and cover their tracks” throughout both the police investigation and the trial.
Mahek Bukhari’s friends who chased down Hussain and Ijazuddin at first had told the police they only intended to stop the two men to have a conversation, whilst simultaneously also claiming they were traveling to a bar with no intention at all of driving the men off the road.
The trial over Hussain and Ijazuddin’s murder spanned the better part of 2022 — only for the judge to discharge the original jury and begin a new trial over an unspecified “irregularity” in the first jury.
The second trial came to an end at the end of last week with the jury finding Mahek Bukhari, Ansreen Bukhari, Rekan Karwan and Raees Jamal guilty of murder.
Other defendants — Natasha Akhtar, Ameer Jamal, and Sanaf Gulamustafa, who were also present in Karwan and Jamal’s cars during the chase — were found guilty of manslaughter.
Ijazuddin’s family testified in court that they were heartbroken by his death for “simply helping his friend.”
The family of Hussain said in a statement before the court that they “are still struggling to come to terms with the enormity of our loss.”
“I never imagined that I would have to bury one of my children, that I would spend every waking moment suddenly expecting him to come back and tell me everything is OK.”
Mahek and Ansreen Bukhari will both be sentenced on September 1.
