WOMAN: Hello? Police Emergency, what's your emergency?
NEWSREADER: A murder investigation is continuing in Luton after
a woman was killed at a house in Overstone Road on Monday night.
Is it possible to get away with murder?
What does a killer do after committing
the most heinous of crimes?
MAN: This was a cold, calculating, callous murder.
Do they carry on as normal and hide in plain sight?
Or go on the run?
MAN: It's sobering that something so terrible
has gone on within a normal house.
How do the actions of a killer after their crime
influence the police investigation?
NEWSREADER: Police are still at the home of a woman from Luton
who was murdered on Monday evening.
NEWSREADER: Her family have paid tribute to a loving mother
to four beautiful children.
By focusing on the aftermath, we unpick the mindset of a killer,
understand the motive and reveal
what the killer did next.
NARRATOR: 26-year-old Saima Khan and her 18 year-old sister, Sabah,
move from Holland to this street with their parents and two brothers.
Saima Khan's family seemed the very image of a respectable family
that lived in the suburbs.
They all had jobs, both Saima
and her sister worked as carers,
and they all seemed to be upstanding members of the community.
It's just the normal, run-of-the-mill street,
I would say.
You know, people live how they live.
It's a very suburban area, very family oriented,
so certainly, there's never been any major crime that I know of.
NARRATOR: The two sisters soon settled in to their new life.
The two were inseparable.
In fact, Sabah described the way in which they
interacted with each other as being so close
that she felt it was one soul divided into two bodies.
You could tell they were close, obviously,
'cause wherever they would go, they would go together anyway.
Saima Khan marries Hafeez
and he moves into the happy family home in Luton.
Saima and Hafeez go on to have four children.
For the inseparable sisters, this was a challenging change
in the family dynamic.
The tale of two sisters,
one of whom was married and had children
and had the perfect family life.
And the other was the younger sister who
lived more or less in her shadow.
NARRATOR: But in 2016, everything for this family was to change.
It was otherwise an ordinary day in the life of that family.
Saima was due to go out and work as a carer,
which was her part-time job.
Sabah, as always,
would be looking after her nephews and nieces back in the house.
Just before 11:00, Sabah sent four text messages
to Saima Khan, telling her that one of the children was crying
and she should come home as soon as possible.
NARRATOR: Saima responds to her sister's call
and returns home to her children.
Her car pulls into the driveway at 11:07pm.
A neighbour's CCTV camera picks up the moment she enters the house.
But as Saima Khan enters her home, the unthinkable happens.
She is attacked in her hallway,
stabbed and left to die.
NEWSREADER: A woman was killed
at a house in Overstone Road on Monday night.
She's been named locally as 34-year-old Saima Khan,
a mother of four young children.
The killing was ferocious.
It was awful.
There were 68 strikes with a knife.
Some of the injuries were so severe
that Saima nearly lost a hand and her head was nearly cut off.
I was watching telly and you heard all this screaming,
but the sound of the screaming was like a blood-curdling sort of thing.
You know, that's the sound that I got in my head.
I knew that something awful had happened.
NARRATOR: When police arrive at the scene,
they are met by Saima's sister, Sabah,
who tragically came across her sister's body.
They were met with a scene of complete carnage.
This was an ordinary, humble family home,
in which in the hallway was lying the body of a woman.
There was blood everywhere.
So much blood that it was almost like a river.
The police body cameras record everything Sabah says
following her discovery of her sister in the hallway.
Sabah Khan told police that she had been upstairs in the shower,
heard a bang, come downstairs
and found her sister in the hallway, very badly injured.
She assumed that there had been an intruder
and it was a burglary gone wrong.
NARRATOR: Rumours of a burglary escalate through the community.
REPORTER: On this side of the house,
there's also a side door with quite a lot of the glass missing,
leading people to speculate that that might have been
how a suspected burglar may have gained access to the house.
We did feel very scared. I used to double-lock the door anyway,
thinking at any time, anybody could come in.
And I was afraid to be home alone anyway.
There was a great deal of fear among people
locally because, as the story was at the time, this was a lady who'd
returned home to her house to see her children and had succumbed to
a fairly horrific death.
A community shaken to the core by a brutal murder.
As police scramble to make sense of the immediate facts,
where is the killer?
What are they doing in these vital moments,
having just killed Saima so savagely?
Have they fled the scene?
Or are they closer than you think?
34-year-old mother-of-four Saima Khan from Luton
has been stabbed on her doorstep.
Inside the house is her beloved sister, Sabah.
As police arrive on the scene,
she reveals that she has come downstairs to discover
her sister dying.
NEWSREADER: The murder investigation is continuing in Luton
after a woman was killed.
Neighbours say she was the victim of a botched burglary.
REPORTER: There's also, on this side of the house,
a side door with quite a lot of the glass missing,
leading people to speculate
that that might have been how a suspected burglar may have
gained access to the house.
Faced with a broken window pane and a seemingly surprise attack
carried out to such a ferocious extent,
is this a burglary gone wrong, or something more sinister?
After such a brutal crime, the question police need to answer
is, "What does a killer do next?"
NARRATOR: This is where police use expert criminologists
to get into the mind of a killer, and determine their next move.
My name's Dr Jane Monckton-Smith and I'm a forensic criminologist.
In the very early stages of any investigation,
we can look at patterns and behaviours of killers,
to try and find out what the motivation is.
NARRATOR: Overstone Road in Luton is now a crime scene
and the family are moved to a property nearby
so a thorough forensic search of the family home can begin.
So, I got a phone call from the news desk
just telling me that there had been a death
as a result of what we thought was a bungled robbery at the time.
This was a road I'd driven past so many times.
But when I got here on that day, it was totally transformed.
There were police cars everywhere, stretching up the road.
The police cordon started probably a few yards up the road.
For the police, time is now of the essence.
The first 60 minutes of the investigation,
and indeed, the first 24 hours,
are the golden hours for us
because we know the suspect will likely go home, change clothes,
wash and shave and shower.
And then we've lost some of the forensic evidence.
First port of call is to seal the place off, cordon it.
Only people go in there wearing protective clothes
and protective shoes and gloves.
And then we'll have an examination,
looking first for any murder weapon.
With forensic teams carrying out a fingertip search of the house,
others comb the neighbourhood.
It was just eerie, you know?
There was a very still quietness about the road.
Police knocked at the door and asked us if we'd seen anything
or anybody down the garden or, "Had you heard anything?"
Then everything was cordoned off, as well.
From then onwards, they started the investigation, I think.
That's the forensic team, like you said,
every day, throughout the whole week, basically, you know.
Doing the investigations
in the garden, on the road, everywhere, they were doing.
Two days later and the police have no murder weapon,
no motive and no suspect.
What they do have is a body.
And the post-mortem results provide crucial evidence.
Post-mortem is critical because
it will prove that you have a murder.
It should be able to tell you the size of the knife
from the wounds, by measuring it.
So when you come out of the post-mortem,
you know you've definitely got a murder,
you know she definitely died
by however many knife wounds there were.
It gives a profile.
That kind of violence, that comes from an almost unearthly rage.
Rumours start to spread that this is not all as it seems.
It's difficult to understand why a burglar would see someone like
Saima Khan as such a threat that she had to be murdered,
and not just murdered,
stabbed repeatedly with such ferocity
that her neck was practically severed,
unless he was a raving lunatic.
It's hard to imagine how an intruder,
or why an intruder would have carried out
that particular kind of attack.
Suddenly, the police have a new focus.
This is not necessarily a burglary gone wrong.
The post-mortem results point towards frenzied violence,
more characteristic of a crime of passion.
Murders in botched burglaries are incredibly rare,
and there is no reason in that scenario
for somebody to be incredibly angry.
There was a change in the air.
There was a change of feeling in the community.
The kind of injuries, which we were hearing that Saima had experienced,
were not the kind of injuries
you would expect in those circumstances.
NARRATOR: As the person who discovered the body,
police need to interview sister Sabah,
as her account could hold the key to the case.
Sabah's police interview is consistent with her story
of a possible intruder.
She told the police she was in the shower
when her sister returned home.
She heard a bang, I think, and she came downstairs
and she found her in the hallway, in a pool of blood.
And she assumed that it had been a burglar or an intruder
or something like that because the back door had been smashed in.
The police would have wanted to know
everything about Saima's private life
and, of course, Sabah would have been a person
who could give that kind of information.
Sabah also offers police some vital information
about sister Saima's personal life -
that her sister was having an affair.
During the interview with the police,
Sabah said that she had overheard a conversation
between her sister and her sister's lover,
where he had threatened her.
So police would have looked at the husband
because that would have been the more obvious suspect.
And if Saima Khan had been having an affair, like her sister said,
it would have certainly given him a reason to have killed her.
In this kind of situation,
the most likely person to have murdered Saima would be her husband.
That's just a statistical likelihood.
So they would definitely have been looking at him.
Police trawl through the family computers looking for clues.
And what they soon discover turns the investigation on its head.
It wasn't Saima having an affair.
It was Hafeez.
Police hone in on Hafeez's internet activities.
In any investigation, anybody who you think
is a potential suspect,
then you will start looking at their use of IT.
Telephones, computers, laptops, iPads.
In this day and age, everyone leaves a digital footprint.
The examination of the family computers is a game-changer.
Someone wanted Saima Khan dead.
On the internet searches, they found how you could kill somebody,
how you could poison them, how you could overdose with drugs.
When forensic investigators delve deeper,
they discover something else.
It isn't Hafeez who has been making these searches.
It's Sabah.
She started internet searches,
looking at ways of poisoning someone, ways of killing someone.
She hired somebody in Pakistan,
who was one of these priests who dealt in the black arts,
and asked him to cast a spell on her sister, Saima,
to see if that would get rid of her.
We know that she had engaged the services
of a mysterious character called 'The Fixer' in Pakistan.
She had paid him 5,000 pounds and asked him to kill her sister.
In fact, Sabah Khan's internet records revealed that, for months,
she's been searching ways to kill someone and not get caught.
WOMAN: Sabah Khan,
she'd done Google searches for ways of killing people -
poisons, poisonous snakes, drugs -
all sorts of different ways
and how to commit a perfect murder and get away with it.
Sabah has been planning her sister's murder,
or at least contemplating the possibility of murdering her sister,
for a period of time.
It demonstrates the premeditation involved.
This isn't a crime of passion,
it's not an in-the-moment scenario.
This is somebody who has orchestrated
the downfall of another human being, her own sister,
somebody that she's grown up with, lived with, loved.
She has been living with her whilst planning her death.
NEWSREADER: It's 11:00, I'm Simon Oxley.
The headlines...
As the police focus shifts onto the victim's sister,
in Overstone Road, scene of crime officers make a crucial discovery,
in Sabah's bedroom.
They found the bag, which had some blood-stained clothing,
and they found a murder weapon with blood on it.
The evidence was sitting in that bag.
There was the knife, there were bloodied clothes.
The murder weapon and clothes are swiftly sent for forensic tests.
The results - damning.
The police also found a black hoodie inside the bag
in Sabah Khan's bedroom, and they analysed it
and found there were flecks of glass on the hoodie,
which showed that she had been near the door when it had been broken,
supposedly by the burglars, but actually by Sabah Khan herself.
REPORTER: Sabah Khan from Newark Road in Luton
was arrested by Bedfordshire Police on Tuesday.
REPORTER: The 26-year-old is accused of murdering her sister
at her house in Overstone Road.
The murder weapon showed traces of Saima's DNA.
We're now thinking, "We've cracked the case now. We've solved it."
REPORTER: Sabah Khan from Luton was arrested
by Bedfordshire Police on Tuesday.
The 26-year-old is accused of murdering her sister.
NARRATOR: Sabah Khan has been arrested
for the murder of her sister, Saima.
The killer had been in front of police all along.
But what turns a loving daughter,
a devoted sister, into a cold-blooded killer?
And how had Sabah Khan got away with her crime for eight days?
After the murder, Sabah may have felt some relief
that she'd actually done what she had planned to do.
And there may have been a period where she was thinking a little bit
more clearly but focused on diverting the police investigation.
Journalist Emily Pennink was hot on the story.
She was staging a burglary.
Afterwards, she hid the blood-stained knife
and the clothes that she had been wearing,
including the black hoodie,
and she smashed the back door
and she'd upturned a box of jewellery, as well.
So she'd really considered it very carefully,
and she'd carried it out
with cold and calculating precision
to make it look like a burglary.
She's created a scene,
now Sabah needs to get rid of the evidence, and takes a shower.
I cannot think that you could stab someone over 60 times
and not get covered in blood.
Having set the scene of a burglary gone wrong,
Sabah's plan is in place, but for it to work,
she needs to notify people of her supposed discovery.
But it's not the police she calls. It's her father.
Calling her parents first
made sense from her point of view
because she didn't want the police to arrive too quickly,
but she needed to call someone
to show that she had reacted to the situation which had faced her,
which was her sister lying in the hallway with multiple stab wounds.
One of the reasons she'd have called her father was because
she wanted to cover her tracks. She wanted to give herself an alibi.
He's the most obvious person she'd call.
Remember, she's from a strict Muslim background.
He would know what to do. So part of it is she's playing on that.
Secondly, it gives her a chance to practice her story -
does this sound plausible?
And most importantly, it kind of gives her some breathing space.
NARRATOR: Sabah's family rush to the scene within minutes,
closely followed by an ambulance...
and the police.
She probably thinks that there's every chance
she's going to get away with it,
especially if she can manipulate the investigation.
Crucially, police body cameras record the aftermath.
Let's look again at Sabah's performance.
This is a killer caught on camera.
She'd rehearsed her story time and time again
in the planning of this murder,
and she was determined, you know, when the police turned up,
she was going to get that story out.
She was going to divert the investigation.
And she may have appeared, on the surface,
to be quite agitated but I don't think she was.
I think she was just determined to get her story out
and to get the chronology out.
But she didn't seem unduly upset.
She wasn't crying
and she certainly wasn't what you might call hysterical.
Some of the things you might expect to see
when you've just found your sister brutally murdered.
When you look at Sabah through the body cam,
talking to the police moments after her sister has been
found mutilated and murdered,
she shows something entirely distinct to what we'd expect.
Firstly, she lists all the things that happened in chronology.
It's almost like she's articulated the story
and she's ready to tell it.
Secondly, she's incredibly compliant.
So she's behaving for the police officers.
She feels it's important
to make sure that she seems completely honest.
NARRATOR: As Sabah warms to her role,
she even claims she tried to stem blood flowing from Saima's wounds.
Sabah's confidence in her performance is building.
Even when police point to a cut to her own hand.
This is someone who has planned their response to the ultimate degree.
Sabah's cut herself with the glass when she's smashed the window.
The way that she tries to cover that up when the police
ask her why she's got a wound
is to suggest that she was trying to help her sister.
She got cut during trying to cover up her wound.
Now, that again puts her in a position of hero.
How could she possibly have caused any harm to her sister?
She was merely trying to protect her.
Two days after the murder,
and this is where Sabah is called to the police station
to make that all-important witness statement,
as the first person on the scene.
So, the police were dealing with Sabah
as potentially a crucial witness to the murder
and they treated her as such.
She gave all the outward signs of someone
who was deeply and genuinely distraught.
She was a grieving sibling.
She's the one who chanced upon her sister's body
and everything about her demeanour
suggested to the police that she was someone who was deeply upset.
After the murder, she may have felt some relief
that she'd actually done what she had planned to do,
and there may have been a period where she was thinking a little bit
more clearly, but focused on diverting the police investigation.
But as that relief kind of wanes away,
the worry about what she's actually done and can she get away with it,
will start to come in.
So she will be very nervous at this point.
NARRATOR: It's during this witness interview,
Sabah steers the investigation even further from herself,
by introducing a new focus.
She tried to sully the name of her sister
by implying that her sister might have been having a secret affair
that no-one else knew about,
introducing a possible mystery suspect
who may have had a motive to kill her.
Now, this is clever in two ways.
Firstly, she's trying to distract the police,
she's trying to give another motive for the death of her sister.
But she's also - and this is the insidious part of that lie -
she's also trying to discredit her sister
in the relationship she had with her husband.
She's trying to make her the guilty party.
And that's destroying the image of her sister, full stop.
NARRATOR: Police believe Sabah's account
and she returns to the fold of her grieving family.
REPORTER: It's 2:00. I'm Lee Agnew.
REPORTER: Saima's husband, Hafeez, says the brutal murder has deprived
his children of their mother and, instead of being able to spend time
as a family, they've been left with a gap in their lives
and their hearts torn apart.
Three days after Saima's murder, shockwaves were still reverberating
around the community.
And Sabah's movements were not going unnoticed.
Well, she just went to work, you know. I mean, it was...
She was booked to go to work so she just went to work as normal.
And they tried to get on with their lives as best as they could.
Sabah Khan, we know, went back to work
and it's difficult to imagine
what her mindset must have been at that time.
She'd pulled off a huge stunt.
Not only had she committed this crime,
but she'd concocted a tale about a burglary,
which was readily believed by the community
and seemed to be the answer to all of her problems.
The police would have been watching Sabah's behaviour.
There are things that she may have done
that may have made the police think,
"Well, we need to look closely there."
After her sister's murder,
Sabah's actions, as far as she's concerned,
have almost let her get away with it.
She's played a part,
helped police with their enquiries, and supported her grieving family
and Saima's husband, Hafeez.
Now the police investigation is catching up with her.
There was, of course, a shift during the investigation
where Sabah, who'd been the prime witness in this case,
suddenly became a suspect.
They are about to discover a vital piece of evidence,
which takes the case in a whole new, twisted direction.
You know, I mean, nobody knows what happens in houses.
You have perfect families, they look perfect.
You know, nobody knows.
But when you find out that somebody so close to you
is capable of that level of violence, it's shocking.
Having discovered Sabah had been researching the internet
for ways to kill her sister, police have now uncovered something else.
CCTV footage of Sabah buying the knife.
Police were able to obtain CCTV footage of Sabah queuing up
at a supermarket, actually buying that knife,
which she would later use to kill her sister.
It's irrefutable evidence.
But why would Sabah Khan want her sister dead?
I think Sabah Khan wanted all the things that her sister had.
She wanted a husband, she wanted her children
and, if she couldn't have her own children,
she wanted Saima's children.
MAN: It's deeply disturbing to think
that within the middle of the community,
a supposedly happy family had this time-bomb ticking,
waiting to go off.
It was such a shocking and wholly unprecedented crime.
With Sabah Khan in custody, police seize her mobile phone,
and what they find is explosive.
NARRATOR: In Luton, with Sabah Khan in custody,
charged with the murder of her sister, Saima,
police are piecing together evidence, trying to find a motive.
And a search of Sabah's mobile phone reveals information
which turns the case on its head.
It isn't Saima with the secret lover.
It's Sabah.
But who was the affair with?
Suddenly, the motive becomes clear.
Police discovered that Sabah had been having an affair
with Saima's husband for up to four years.
They would be sleeping together under the same roof,
in which they lived with the extended family.
Sabah was, by that stage, 26 years of age.
Coming from a cultural background in which it would be expected
that, by her mid-20s, she'd be married,
as indeed her sister, Saima, was,
that she'd have started her own family,
she didn't have that.
A jealousy developed from Sabah towards Saima Khan,
who had the husband, she had the children,
she had a certain status in seniority within the family.
A mother found dead.
A younger sister arrested and charged.
The discovery of an illicit affair.
But how had this culminated in murder?
MAN: The impression I got of Sabah was that,
in many respects, she'd been a loner.
She'd become detached from the world outside.
I didn't get the sense that she had a social circle
of friends and associates.
It seemed like she kept herself to herself and her world really
revolved her connection with her sister and with her parents.
NARRATOR: In fact, Sabah's life not only revolved
around that of her sister's,
but became intrinsically entwined with it when, in 2012,
Sabah and her brother-in-law, Hafeez, embarked on an affair.
MAN: It was an illicit relationship.
I mean, bearing in mind, we're talking about
a traditional Pakistani family,
in which this sort of behaviour was completely unacceptable -
it was unacceptable in most families you'd imagine -
that a brother-in-law would be sleeping with her sister-in-law,
almost under the nose of his wife.
At some point, he actually looked into whether it was possible
to have an Islamic marriage with both sisters
but was told that wouldn't be allowed.
We heard that Sabah had become pregnant by Hafeez at some stage
during their affair, she'd been forced to have an abortion.
So emotions were running really high.
Sabah became very fixated with her relationship with Hafeez.
She described it as an abusive relationship
and she had good reason to say that
because he was ten years older than her,
he was much more worldly experienced than her,
there was a degree of manipulation in the relationship.
NARRATOR: Police discovered in February 2016
that Hafeez had cooled his relationship with Sabah
and told her he and Saima
were planning on moving out of the family home with their children.
In fact, a moving date was set for Wednesday, 25 May, 2016.
I think she had planned to kill her sister some time before,
but when she found out that her sister was moving out very soon,
that was the trigger for her to do it quickly, to find an opportunity.
For Sabah, knowing that her brother-in-law
was not only breaking off the relationship
but that he was intending to move the family elsewhere,
so she was going to lose not only him, but her sister,
that would have provoked rage.
Because firstly, she recognises that she means nothing.
He doesn't want her anymore. She's discarded.
But secondly, her sister seems to be leaving with it all.
The very person that she's learnt to resent, that she's been fuelled
with this anger and envy for, is leaving with her prize.
Imagine the power in that moment, the fear, the anger, the hostility.
That's where the rage begins.
Sabah had the motive, she had the murder weapon,
she just needed an opportunity.
And a last-minute family funeral
gave her that window.
There was one day when she could be alone in the house with Saima,
although the four children were asleep at the time upstairs.
So she planned to take action on the day when the rest of the family
would be out at the funeral.
MAN: Computer records show Sabah had actually Googled,
"How long does a Muslim funeral take?"
Now, that was to ensure that she had enough time
to both kill Saima
and make the house ready for her parents to come back.
Having identified her window of opportunity to murder,
Sabah prepared to carry out her plan.
Sabah came home, I think about 9:30 in the evening.
Her sister went out to fill up the car with petrol
and visit an elderly client who lived nearby.
At about - well, it was just before 11:00,
Sabah sent four text messages to Saima Khan,
telling her that one of the children was crying
and she should come home as soon as possible.
What Sabah did when her sister returned home
reveals the true nature of this cold, calculating killer.
And miraculously, Saima's last movements were caught on camera.
One of the neighbours had a camera
pointing in the direction of Saima's house.
It was actually to protect his own driveway,
but fortuitously for the police,
it managed to pick up Saima's arrival home.
In this CCTV footage,
we see Saima Khan arrive home and enter her house.
The hall lights stay on for 45 seconds,
but then they go out for eight minutes.
WOMAN: Over the next eight minutes,
Sabah Khan stabbed her sister multiple times.
And the level of hatred
and ferocity behind it
is really exhibited in where she stabbed her.
She stabbed her face and her skull and her abdomen,
cut her hands.
I think there were defensive wounds on her hands.
The main wound was to the neck and she stabbed her so forcefully
that the knife that she'd bought days before
went through,
through and through the neck, and almost decapitated her sister.
So she was bleeding out in the hallway.
When we spoke to Sabah about what had happened during those
eight minutes, she only had a very limited recollection.
She said that when her sister came home,
an argument developed very rapidly between the two of them
and it started in the kitchen.
All she can remember is reaching for a knife in the drawer
in the kitchen and then walking towards
her sister and going for her.
Some eight minutes later, she was sitting on the floor
with a knife in her hand, wondering what had just happened.
On 23 October, 2017,
Sabah Khan's case came before the Old Bailey,
and the unexpected happened.
Sabah Khan pleaded guilty
and was sentenced to life imprisonment,
with a minimum term of 22 years.
MAN: I don't think anyone will ever be able
to penetrate the mind of Sabah Khan
and find out what made her change, not just in a small way,
but in such a drastic way
in the way that she felt towards Saima,
to cause her to bring about her death in such a brutal fashion.
It's something which Sabah will live with for the rest of her life.
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