May 2014 British man jailed for manslaughter of toddler over ‘Skype’ – Child sadistically abused over pro-longed periods of time A NORWEGIAN woman and her British lover have been sentenced to eight and nine years in jail for killing the woman’s 21-month-old daughter while video-chatting online. Hunaina Chaudhry died after her mother Yasmin Chaudhry plunged her head in a bucket of water While the child had already been deliberately deprived of sleep following the webcam instructions of Ammaz Omer Qureshi, who was watching live on skype in London at the time. The Oslo court charged the couple with manslaughter, since it considered that they did not take the infant’s life deliberately. “The court notes that, for any person with sound judgement, the immersion of the head of a child around one-and-a-half-years-old in a bucket lacks any reasonable purpose,” it said in its verdict. According to the police, the incident took place around 3am, after the toddler interrupted the couple during an online video chat. In order to “discipline” the child, Yasmin Chaudhry plunged her head in the bucket twice, following Qureshi’s instructions. When the infant lost consciousness, her mother called the emergency services and first reported a domestic incident. The toddler died of a cerebral oedema the day after in hospital. The couple was also charged with child abuse. During her last six months of life, the toddler was subjected to horrific and prolonged abuse The ‘mother’ admitted that she already used horrific discipline methods on her daughter, who she said was “a difficult child”. She told court officials that she repeatedly slapped Hunaina hard on the buttocks or face, sat her naked in the shower and hosed her with cold water, and gagged the toddlers mouth with adhesive tape when she cried. The little girl was forced to eat teaspoons of chilli powder, and would be put in the corner of the living room and forced to stay there for long periods of time. The child would also be strapped tightly in a chair. The child was sleep-deprived, and forced to sleep on the floor instead of in a bed. Sometimes her mother stuffed a sock in her mouth to keep her quiet The child would also have her legs and arms bound with rope for hours on end as he watched on Skype
Chaudhry started off by splashing or spraying the toddler in the face as a punishment, and this escalated to putting her head under a running tap, and then to using a bucket. Married accountant Qureshi of Pinner, who had previously beaten two of his wives, would give advice from London on topics he knew nothing about and Chaudhry had such a need for authority in her life that she blindly obeyed him, the court heard. The pair met on Facebook in autumn 2009 through Chaudhry’s brother, a school friend of Qureshi, and they began an affair. They were each sentenced for manslaughter yesterday because the court found it could not be proved that they intended to kill the toddler. The mother discussed punishments intended to discipline her daughter with Qureshi online. The sentences were much milder than the 16 and 18 years of imprisonment the prosecutor requested. The defence pleaded for an acquittal or, failing that, the most lenient sentence possible. The judges thought that both deserved nine years, one as the executor and the other as the instigator, but decided to reduce the mother’s sentence by one year because she had cooperated with the police. During the trial, Qureshi’s lawyer Vibeke Hein Baera told the court: “He denies the accusations of premeditated murder and assault. “My client is baffled that he is accused of a crime committed in a country which he – at that point in time – had never set foot in.”