Beauty queen’s grieving family ask: How was our Sahar’s life cut so tragically short?

Posted by mija on Dec 27, 2008 in News | 0 comments

Friends say Sahar Daftary had never been happier since splitting from her ex. So why did she arrange to meet him late at night at his luxury apartment – and what caused her to plunge to her death from its 12-floor balcony?
The new, pretty pink dress Sahar Daftary had planned to wear for her 24th birthday on Christmas Day hangs unworn in her mother Anisa’s house in West London – a terrible reminder of celebrations which will now never happen.
The beautiful young model had planned to pack the dress on Christmas Eve, ready for her flight to Dubai from London Gatwick Airport on Christmas Day in the company of five of her closest female friends – for a much deserved sunshine holiday after what had been an emotionally trying year.
‘She asked me to buy her a pink dress,’ said one of Sahar’s girlfriends. ‘She wanted to wear pink. She had everything ready down to the last detail – the shoes, everything. She knew how she wanted us all to look and told us all to bring our cameras.’
Instead, those same friends and Sahar’s family travelled to Manchester on Thursday to light 24 candles – one for each year of her life – at the spot where the young woman mysteriously plunged to her death from the 12th floor of her former husband’s apartment at a luxury block of flats at Salford Quays. Amid the candles, 14 bouquets and teddies were birthday cards bearing heartbreaking messages.
One of them read: ‘We should have been on our flight today. Instead, I’m leaving you this card at the scene of your passing. It’s surreal to me. It’s like my heart has been ripped out of my chest. I honestly don’t know how to go on without you.’
From Sahar’s mother Anisa, a widow, were the words: ‘Our hearts are broken for ever. Tears have been falling now for so long. When we think of your beautiful face, it all seems so wrong.
‘You had so much to look forward to and so much left to do. But God needed someone in heaven who is as special as you.’
There were messages, too, from Sahar’s four devastated sisters who were also present.
Absent from the vigil was Rashid Jamil, 33, the wealthy businessman Sahar married in a lavish Muslim ceremony 12 months ago, only to discover he was apparently still married to and living with another woman with whom he had two children.

He was arrested by police on suspicion of murder after Sahar’s death at 10pm on Saturday, December 20, and released on bail after ten hours of questioning. The red rose he left earlier in the week had been removed by the time Sahar’s distraught family arrived in Manchester on Christmas Day.
This week he was at the large, red-bricked, detached ?750,000 home overlooking cricket, hockey and lacrosse clubs in leafy Altrincham, Greater Manchester, which he shares with his other Muslim wife, marketing executive Narhisa Amjad, 29, and two children aged four and one.
Sporting a beard and dressed in jeans and a striped top, he came to the door of his home only to say: ‘I’m completely innocent. I’m devastated.’
He said his wife Narhisa was standing by him before referring all other enquiries to his solicitor Keith Dyson.
‘He’s devastated at what’s happened’
Mr Dyson re-affirmed his client’s innocence, saying the relationship between Mr Jamil and Sahar Daftary, who had split up in May less than six months after their wedding, had been ‘on-off’ and ‘very up and down’.
As for the events of last Saturday, when Sahar had apparently gone back to her former lover’s ?250,000 rented flat with him to collect her belongings after travelling to Manchester to take part in a fashion show, Mr Dyson said that while Mr Jamil had been in the flat with her, there had been no row and he had not seen her fall.
‘He knew straight away,’ Mr Dyson told the Mail. ‘I think there was a noise or a scream and that alerted him to the fact that something was wrong. He ensured the emergency services were there promptly.
‘I think the 999 call was made from the concierge’s phone. I don’t know whether he made the call or somebody else made it on his behalf.
‘We just don’t know what happened. He’s certainly not responsible for her death or the fall. He’s obviously devastated at what’s happened.
‘It’s absolutely not as a result of anything he’s done. He has cooperated fully with police. He has a full account to give and will give it at the coroner’s court.’
Initial reports – which suggested the police were treating the fall as either a suicide or a tragic accident – have infuriated Sahar’s family, and while they know no more than anyone else about what happened that night, they say they rue the day Sahar fell in love with Jamil and believe she’d be alive today had she never met him.
Sahar’s sister Mariya Massumi, 34, a part-time hairdresser said: ‘We are determined to find out the truth because our only wish now is for Sahar’s soul to rest in peace and she will not until we have justice for her.
‘We believe there is absolutely no way she would have committed suicide. She was a religious girl, she prayed every day, she knew committing suicide would mean going to hell and she wanted to go to heaven. She had everything to live for.’
One of Sahar’s closest friends, who was due to go on holiday to Dubai with her and has asked to remain anonymous, said: ‘She was so looking forward to her birthday and we were going to stay with her best friend Fatima in Dubai. We’d booked our flights for her birthday, Christmas Day, because it was a bit cheaper and were due to arrive that evening.‘Sahar was a delightful, happy person. She was studying accountancy at college and was looking to the future.’
A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester Police said this week that they had received a report of sexual assault from Miss Daftary in May 2008 and launched an investigation, but this was later dropped when she refused to co-operate further.
Rashid’s business history
When Sahar’s family first met Jamil they couldn’t have been more impressed with a man who appeared in possession of good looks and wealth.
On the surface he and Sahar, winner of the Face of Asia competition in 2007, appeared the perfect couple – having met in Manchester where she regularly went on modelling assignments. He lavished attention and cash on the petite, size-eight model, whose family are originally from Afghanistan, although it remains unclear how wealthy Jamil is.
According to his first wife, lawyer Sebina Malik, 32, whom he married in a legally recognised civil ceremony and whom he was divorced from last year, he started life as a curry house manager in Rusholme, Manchester, and was more recently a ?42,000-a-year ‘advisor to the public’.
On his Friends Reunited profile, Jamil, who also has an 11-year-old daughter with his first wife, describes himself as a company director and says of himself: ‘I live in Manchester and have been living a very successful life for the past five years.’
He is listed as a one-time director of at least five different companies, one manufacturing glass and another retailing specialist foodstuffs. Three of these firms have been dissolved.
No accounts have ever been filed for Hidihoohaa Ltd, of which he was appointed a director in June 2007. The firm was dissolved in 2008, and the address for two of its co-directors is an unoccupied flat in a luxury Manchester block.
Neither have accounts been filed for another of his companies, Springhill Wholesale Ltd, and there was no reply at the addresses of Jamil’s co-directors which the Mail visited.
Records at Companies House show that while one food retailing company is still active and made healthy returns, they only cover the period up to August 2006, before Jamil became a director in June 2007.
Jamil is not listed as the owner of the current home he shares with Narhisa Amjad, but did buy a flat three years ago for nearly ?130,000 seven miles away in the multi-racial district of Whalley Range, Manchester. His lawyer declined to discuss Mr Jamil’s career.
‘The perfect couple’
How much Sahar knew of Jamil’s history before she fell in love with him is unclear, but his first wife believes that, if her own experience is anything to go by, it would not have been much.
Ms Malik, who has known Jamil since the age of seven when they attended the same school in Rochdale and married him in 1996 at Trafford Register Office, said: ‘He’s tall, handsome and is a sweet-talker. We were childhood sweethearts. I loved him and he loved me.
‘People would have said we were the perfect couple, but four or five years after the marriage he began drinking and started his affairs. Things went downhill after that.
‘My marriage to him was like a rollercoaster ride. I was constantly under pressure. I was constantly unhappy.
‘He didn’t want responsibility, he just wanted to be carefree. He wanted the “chase” and once he’d finished the chase, he’d move on to the next woman. He was on a power trip.
‘He always had two women on the go. Two girls turned up at my house, knocking on the door claiming they were pregnant. They said he’d promised to marry them, to divorce and leave me.
‘He would cover his tracks by saying there was nothing going on and that they were lying. I believed him, but I stopped believing him when Narhisa had her son. He supported her and left us for her.’
‘She knew nothing of his background’
But Jamil didn’t stay loyal to Narhisa for long.
‘He was seeing Narhisa when he began seeing Sahar in 2006 and married her in a Muslim ceremony while he was still living with Narhisa,’ continued Ms Malik.
‘He was married to both because when Narhisa became pregnant he married her in a Muslim ceremony, too. I think he was obsessed with Sahar.
‘For him to be with a model, a girl like that, was beyond his dreams. She was young and beautiful. He lavished her with money and jewels.
‘He gave her lots of luxuries. I believe she knew nothing of his background. He’s very irresponsible and very immature.’
Ms Malik claims he’s had nothing to do with their daughter since their split, when the girl was five. Indeed, Sahar’s family insist she knew nothing of all this when their nikah (a Muslim wedding) took place at the Holiday Inn in Brentford, West London, in December 2007 in front of 200 guests.
‘He seemed like a nice man and it was a beautiful ceremony,’ said Sahar’s sister, Mrs Massumi. ‘An imam was present to make it all legitimate. So many people witnessed the wedding – it wasn’t a secret. They both seemed happy. It was such a beautiful wedding; they cut a cake and exchanged rings.
‘She didn’t deserve to meet him and for it all to come to this. He had a wife and kids.’

Sahar, a former personal shopper at Harrods who was studying accounting in Ealing, West London, at the time of her death, was reportedly unaware that Jamil was living with his wife Narhisa and children when she moved to Manchester to live at the Salford Quays apartment.
‘We got a phone call from his wife Narhisa a few weeks after the wedding. We were shocked and didn’t believe her at first.
‘We believed him and we thought she was lying, but the wife called every day so eventually we went to Manchester, a few months ago, to their house,’ says Mrs Massumi.
‘Rashid was very calm when we got there. He said to us – in front of his wife – “I want to live with Sahar, not Narhisa.” We arrived about midnight and were there for around two hours. Rashid said to my sister: “I love you. I want to be with you. I want to stay with you.”
‘I said to him: “Listen, Rashid, you are either very clever or very stupid.” He said: “I’m sorry.”
‘He was very calm and said he was innocent. I asked him why he had done this and he said he wasn’t happy in his current marriage.
‘We told him: “You have got two children, what are you doing?’ But he kept saying he wasn’t happy with his wife and wanted to be with Sahar.’
Heartbreak for Sahar – and a new start
But according to her family, Sahar was not prepared to accept the situation, and after a holiday together in America she left Manchester last May for West London. It was clear from the words she wrote on a blog on the internet that she was heartbroken, however.
‘Just look at the tiny shattered pieces of your heart that you don’t even know where to start. Which do you pick up first? What about those beautiful dreams that you allowed to be built before your eyes, within your heart, those dreams which were what kept you going – what about them? Those are gone, everything is gone . . .’
Heartbroken but never suicidal, her family say, and in the days before her death she wrote on her blog: ‘Sweetheart Sahar is back with bigger and better things.’
Her sister Mrs Massumi says Sahar went to Manchester on the Saturday to do the make-up at a show and also hoped to persuade Jamil to sign papers freeing her from the Islamic marriage while she was there.
They spoke on the phone first, and when Jamil agreed to sign them after initially refusing – according to the family – she went back to his flat.
Mr Jamil’s solicitor Keith Dyson confirms his client and Sahar met up at the fashion show, held at an Indian restaurant in Manchester, and that the pair left together for the waterside apartment they once shared – one of three towers near Manchester United’s Old Trafford stadium.
What happened next has yet to be established by police and the family’s grief has been compounded, they say, by comments made by socalled friends and suggestions that Sahar was distressed over a sex video showing her and an unnamed man posted on the internet.
‘It has nothing to do with that,’ says Mrs Massumi. ‘All of Sahar’s closest friends are here with us grieving for her. All these other “friends” are people who were jealous of Sahar. She’d moved on with her life after leaving Rashid. She had everything to live for.’
Sahar’s brother-in-law Joe Karim, who yesterday announced he was hoping to set up a foundation in Sahar’s name, added: ‘This has been a disaster for the family. We are all totally exhausted and drained; devastated that she should die in the very month she was born.
‘We should have been celebrating her birthday this week, not mourning her. We are determined to find out exactly what happened.’
source: dailymail.co.uk