UK jail for mum who allowed hubby to kill her baby

UK jail for mum who allowed hubby to kill her baby

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By Staff Reporter

A YOUNG Zimbabwean mum who allowed her boyfriend to kill her baby has made legal history by becoming the UK's first person to be convicted of family homicide.

Zimbabwean asylum seeker Sandra Mujuru, 21, faces 14 years in jail over the death of her four-month-old girl, Ayesha.

Her live-in lover, Jerry Stephens, 37, has been sentenced to life for murdering the child at their home in New Malden, south-west London.

On 9 May 2005, Stephens smashed the Ayesha's head against a hard surface while Mujuru was at work at Somerfield supermarket in New Malden.

Weeks earlier the boyfriend had broken the child's arm, but the mother failed to alert police.

In 2002 he had attacked another baby, a boy then aged two.

Mujuru knew there was a "significant risk" that Stephens would harm Ayesha, prosecutor David Fisher told the Old Bailey. "She did nothing to protect her."

Stephens was not the girl's father and was said to have called her "ugly" and a "thing".

Police found her wrapped tightly in a blanket where he left her home alone in her cot.

That afternoon Stephens went to the nearby house of his ex-girlfriend, a Kenyan. He hit her with a frying pan so hard that it broke, the court heard.

He was found guilty of child cruelty, causing grevious bodily harm with intent to both Ayesha and the Kenyan ex-girlfriend, and other charges. The court ordered him to serve at least 20 years.

On Tuesday, the jury convicted Mujuru of causing or allowing death to her daughter, and of child cruelty in failing to get medical help.

The charges, under the new Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act, aim to stop parents from walking free if they knew their partner abused the child - This Is London
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