UK: Ashraf Khan Jailed for Fathering Three Children with Daughter

Ashraf Khan, 81, was jailed for committing incest by fathering three children with his own daughter, the abuse only coming to light after the victim told her husband on her deathbed.

Bradford Crown Court had heard that the victim, one of Khan’s six children, had been born in Pakistan where she married her husband and moved to the UK to join her father, also a Pakistani national.

It was during the 1980s that the abuse began and she gave birth to three of her father’s children before passing away in the early 1990s, the Telegraph and Argus reports.

Before she died, the woman told her husband the truth of the parentage of their three children. He did not inform authorities until 2012, Prosecutor Abigail Langford explaining: “He wished to continue to act as a father and care for the children he had brought up as his own.”

Khan was not questioned by police until he returned from Pakistan in 2016, and when he was interviewed in September of that year, the court heard he “denied having any sexual relations with his daughter”.

However, DNA evidence was used to “confirm what his wife had told him in her dying moments”, Ms Langford said.

There was also other medical evidence presented to the court said to be “directly attributed to their incestual parentage”, including an inability to feel certain pain resulting in the offspring suffering injuries such as burns during their childhoods.

Such genetic abnormalities are also at a higher prevalence in children born of first-cousin marriages, who are also at higher risk of infant mortality. Breitbart London reported in 2017 that in the London borough of Redbridge, one in ten infant deaths within the Pakistani community was the “result of genetic complications arising from having related parents”.

The 81-year-old Pakistani man eventually pleaded guilty to incest the month prior to the proposed trial and was sentenced to four and a half years in jail.

The grown children paid tribute to their mother’s “honourable” husband for raising them as his own, with one saying after the trial: “It takes a special man to be a dad, as anyone can be a father. He is one of a kind and we will never be able to repay him for what he has done for us.”

Discussing the profound trauma inflicted on their mother, they added: “We would like this case to bring awareness of incest being committed, and for other people who may have experienced something similar to come forward so that other offenders who have committed similar crimes can be tried through the courts.”