Mum of TikToker has murder sentence appeal rejected

The mother of a TikTok influencer, who was convicted of the murder of her lover and his friend in a high-speed car chase, has had an appeal to reduce her sentence rejected.

Ansreen Bukhari, of George Eardley Close in Stoke-on-Trent, was convicted of the murder of Saqib Hussain and Hashim Ijazuddin in February 2022 alongside her daughter, Mahek Bukhari, and two other men.

She was jailed for 26 years and nine months, but on Friday it was claimed the sentencing judge had failed to appropriately take into account the coercive and controlling behaviour she had suffered at the hands of Hussain.

A panel of three Court of Appeal judges dismissed the claim, saying that the sentence was justified.

James Millington KC, representing Ansreen, told the court that judge Timothy Spencer KC had "set the bar too high" when sentencing the 49-year-old.

He said she had been subjected to coercive and controlling behaviour from Hussain, in the weeks before the crash took place, and that the police had received a report of similar behaviour from an unrelated woman.

Millington said: "Having determined that she wanted to end the relationship, telling the deceased that she wanted to end it on good terms, the answer to that was plainly no.

"Thereafter, and over a period of many, many weeks leading up to these offences, there was what we would categorise as a relentless campaign of blackmail and coercive behaviour from Saqib Hussain towards Ansreen Bukhari."

He said Hussain kept up the "relentless and abusive messages", which "ramped up" on the day of the chase.

Concluding his submissions, Millington argued the "campaign" of coercive control - which is now treated like other domestic abuse offences due to the Victims and Prisoners Act 2024 - should have been used as mitigation by the sentencing judge.

During a three-month trial in 2023, Leicester Crown Court heard Hussain, from Banbury in Oxfordshire, had been "lured" into meeting the Bukharis on the pretence he would be given back £3,000 he said he had spent on taking his lover out during their relationship.

Jurors were told Hussian had used three explicit videos of Ansreen to threaten her after their relationship ended in the weeks before his death.

Instead of meeting Ansreen, Hussain and Ijazuddin - who had driven his friend to the meeting in a Tesco car park in Hamilton in Leicester as a "favour" - were ambushed and then chased by two cars.

On Friday, Lord Justice Jeremy Baker, sitting at the Court of Appeal in London, said the panel was "quite satisfied" that the sentencing judge decided an appropriate starting point for the sentence.

He said Ansreen had been a "central figure" in the plot and had "many opportunities to stop the escalation of events", adding that mitigating circumstances had been "adequately taken into consideration".

Ansreen was found guilty of murder in August 2023 after standing trial alongside seven other people.

The court was told Hussain had threatened to use sexually explicit material to expose his long-running affair with Ansreen in the months prior to the murder.

Mahek Bukhari - who had nearly 129,000 followers on TikTok, where she posted about fashion and beauty - "set a trap" for Hussain on the night he died.

The court was told Ijazuddin's car split in two and caught fire after hitting a tree at the Six Hills junction on the A46, in the early hours of 11 February 2022.

Following the trial, defendants Rekhan Karwan and Raees Jamal were also found guilty of murder.

Natasha Akhtar, 23, from Birmingham, Ameer Jamal, 28, and Sanaf Gulamustafa, 23, both from Leicester, were cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter.

Co-accused Mohammed Patel, 21, from Leicester, was found not guilty of murder or manslaughter.

In October last year, Mahek - who was 22 at the time of the double murder - had her minimum term life sentence reduced from nearly 32 years to 27 years, after an appeal judge in the High Court said the sentencing judge had not taken her age into account.

The High Court ruled Mahek's "youth and her acknowledged immaturity were given far too little weight", and should have "exerted a substantial downward pressure on the minimum term".

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