Bride's brother used car 'as weapon' to murder Good Samaritan before stabbing the groom when family feud exploded after wedding, court hears
A feuding family member killed a 'Good Samaritan' when he 'used his car as a weapon' and ploughed into the middle of a wedding brawl, a court heard yesterday.
Hassan Jhangur, 25, is accused of hitting five people with his Seat Ibiza when he arrived at his sister's wedding reception, where a fight had broken out between the two families.
Sheffield Crown Court heard Jhangur drove into the father of the rival Khan family, who was standing in the street, throwing him over the vehicle's bonnet.
He then crashed into a group of four people, including Chris Marriott who was walking past and stopped to help one of Jhangur's sisters as she lay in the road.
Jurors heard 46-year-old Mr Marriott was killed and the three others were injured, including off-duty midwife Alison Norris and Jhangur's own mother and sister.
The defendant then allegedly got out of the car and stabbed his new brother-in-law, Hasan Khan, several times.
The court heard he later told officers at the police station: 'That's why you don't mess with the Jhangurs.'
Jhangur, of Whiteways Road, Sheffield, denies the murder and manslaughter of Mr Marriott, but has pleaded guilty to causing Mr Marriott's death by dangerous driving.
Jason Pitter KC, opening the trial to jurors yesterday, said the prosecution case is that Jhangur is guilty of murder because he intended 'at the very least to cause really serious harm' when he used his car as a weapon.
He said that although Jhangur's target may have been the Khan family, 'the law says your intentions can be transferred from one person to another, even if he did not intend to hit that particular person'.
Mr Pitter said the 'public spirit' of Mr Marriott and Ms Norris 'brought them unwittingly into the midst of a family dispute', which had spilled out into the street in the Burngreave area of Sheffield on December 27, 2023.
Mr Pitter said a wedding between Amaani Jhangur and Hasan Khan, which had taken place that morning, 'appears to have been at the heart of the tension'.
He told jurors: 'Although Amaani's family may have been relatively happy about the marriage itself, an issue arose over the timing and location of the wedding and escalated to Amaani falling out with her own mother and sisters.
'In the end, none of her family attended the wedding ceremony at the mosque.'
The court heard that when Amaani Jhangur was at the Khan family home in College Court after the wedding, her mother Ambreen Jhangur and sister Nafeesa Jhangur arrived, and an increasingly 'unpleasant' argument in the street escalated into violence, and led to Nafeesa Jhangur being rendered unconscious, probably by members of the Khan family.
Mr Marriott, who was out with his family on a post-Christmas walk, saw Nafessa Jhangur lying in the road and decided, 'fatefully', to see whether he could help, while his wife and children returned home.
Ms Norris, who was also out walking with her partner and children, did the same thing. 'Those actions to help in the dispute were to unwittingly seal their fate,' Mr Pitter said.
The court heard Jhangur had been told about his sister being injured, and arrived at the scene in a Seat Ibiza, driving into Hasan Khan's father, Riasat Khan, who was standing in the middle of the road talking to a 999 call operator.
Mr Pitter said Riasat Khan 'would have been clearly visible to the defendant' and his intention 'could only have been to cause at least really serious harm'.
The court heard Riasat Khan was thrown up on to the bonnet and cartwheeled over the roof of the vehicle, as it continued 'without apparently braking or deviating from its path'.
The Seat then hit a group of four people in the road who were attending to Nafeesa Jhangur - Nafeesa Jhangur herself, Ambreen Jhangur, Ms Norris and Mr Marriott - before coming to a stop in a nearby front garden.
Mr Marriott was wedged completely underneath the car and showed no signs of life when emergency services tipped the vehicle to get to him.
Mr Pitter said Jhangur got out of the car while the engine was still running and stabbed Hasan Khan multiple times to the left side of his head and to his chest, with a knife be had brought with him.
Jhangur has admitted causing serious injury to Alison Norris, Ambreen Jhangur, Nafeesa Jhangur and Riasat Khan by dangerous driving, but also pleaded not guilty to four charges of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
He denies attempting to murder Hasan Khan and wounding him with intent.
His father, Mohammed Jhangur, 57, of Whiteways Road, Sheffield, denies a charge of perverting the course of justice, which relates to him allegedly concealing a knife.
The trial continues.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
BBC News
26 minutes ago
- BBC News
Horse racing's governing body hit by cyber attack
The British Horseracing Authority (BHA) has become the latest major organisation to be targeted by a cyber sporting body, which is responsible for the governance, administration and regulation of horse racing, first identified a ransomware incident at the end of last week. Its London office is temporarily closed, and staff have been asked to work from home or remotely. An investigation is still in its early stages, but according to a source, the incident seems limited to internal systems and data.A spokesperson for the BHA said: "We recently identified and began investigating an IT incident. We are working at pace with external specialists to determine what happened in more detail and safely restore our systems. "The delivery of racedays has continued as normal and will continue to do so. We have informed our colleagues, core industry stakeholders and law enforcement." Retailers Marks and Spencer and the Co-op have both recently been affected by cyber incidents with M&S revealing that some personal customer data was stolen.
BBC News
31 minutes ago
- BBC News
Plan to convert estate agents where PC Sharon Beshenivsky was shot
The former travel agents where PC Sharon Beshenivsky was shot dead while responding to a robbery could be converted into a restaurant under new plans. PC Beshenivsky was murdered outside the Universal Express travel agents in Morley Street, Bradford, in 2005.A planning application submitted to Bradford Council said the site had since "carried a stain" due to its association to the crime. The applicant hoped converting the property into a fully-refurbished restaurant would "remove the stigma" from the building. According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the site has fallen into a state of disrepair, with roof tiles missing, gutters overflowing and the shopfront rotting detail has been revealed about what type of restaurant the business would be, but the application by R Moghul said it would open between 09:00 and 23:00. A memorial stone marking the spot where PC Beshenivsky was shot stands in front of the year, Piran Ditta Khan, the last member of the gang responsible for the armed raid that claimed her life, was sentenced to life in was the last of seven men involved in the robbery to be convicted after spending almost 15 years on the run. He died in prison earlier this application said: "The property previously traded as a travel and money transfer agent, prior to an unfortunate incident in November 2005."The site has since struggled to operate and has carried with it a stain which reflects these events." It said Morley Street was "bustling" due to other developments and the former travel agents remained an "eyesore". To prevent anti-social behaviour and squatting, chipboards were put up to prevent ingress into the rotting timber shopfront would be replaced with anthracite grey aluminium under the proposal."These efforts are in a bid to move away from the tired outlook of the building," the applicant said."The proposed change of use would bring a derelict building back into use. The stigma attached to the building will be removed."A decision on the application is expected next month. Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
My friend Frederick Forsyth was the most patriotic man I've ever met
A preposterous inversion of the natural order of things caused me to meet Freddie Forsyth more than 30 years ago. He wrote me a fan letter. Had I been a fan-letter writing type, I ought by then to have sent him several – notably about The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, two of the best thrillers of the 20th century that I had relished as a teenager in the 1970s. Yet it was he who wrote to me about an article of mine in The Spectator: I can't remember exactly what it was about, but I think it was an assault on the Major administration that was lurching towards the debacle of Black Wednesday in the autumn of 1992. That was Freddie all over. Although one of the world's greatest thriller writers, he was at heart always a journalist, and loved the society of hacks. For years he wrote a column for a national newspaper, and was brilliant at it; and he was brilliant precisely because he teemed with ideas, and expressed them with supreme articulacy. Freddie always had plenty to say because there was so much that motivated him, and annoyed him. He was one of the most patriotic men I ever knew. He believed intensely in our country, abhorred its apparent decline, and wanted to hold to account those he believed were responsible for it. Those feelings imbued almost every piece of journalism he wrote. We corresponded – letters in those days, in the age before email, his under the commanding header 'From The Desk of Frederick Forsyth' – for some months before we met. The letters and the writing paper seemed so fluent and so grand that I became even more in awe of Freddie than I had already been, and I viewed our eventual meeting with both excitement and apprehension. The summer after the fan letter, on a roasting hot day, he and his wife, Sandy, came over to our old farmhouse and sat in the garden and ate a long and boozy lunch. In those days they lived not far away, in their own much more upholstered farmhouse in rural Hertfordshire, and we started to see quite a lot of each other. It was not merely that he and I had a shared world view, and our wives got on famously: the Forsyths were the best imaginable company. Freddie had no side whatsoever, and his modesty was as conspicuous as his massive achievements. He was almost embarrassed when I asked him whether he would autograph my copies of his novels. Yet he inevitably exuded glamour however hard he tried not to. This was not least down to Sandy, who had been Elizabeth Taylor's assistant. One met all sorts of remarkable people when asked over to their house for Sunday lunches, all of which managed to last until dinner time. Celebrated actors were thick on the ground there – Nigel Hawthorne, Robert Powell and Barry Humphries were all close friends, as was Sally Burton, widow of the great actor Richard. I recall a long and revelatory conversation at the Forsyths's table with George Carman, the leading QC and libel lawyer, that was a definite education for me as a journalist. Two things were certain about a visit to the Forsyths: that you would come away having been spectacularly fed and watered, and richly entertained by the company. Yet Freddie, with his easy charm and complete lack of self-obsession, had had his setbacks. He was always devoid of self-pity, but told me ruefully about how he had been fleeced out of a fortune by Roger 'the Ferret' Levett, the notorious fraudster to whom he had entrusted his considerable earnings from his literary successes. The plan had been that Freddie would give up writing; but the Ferret ensured he had to carry on. I always felt, though the pain the Ferret had caused him was undeniably genuine, that in some way he was glad of the necessity to keep writing. That, again, was the old hack in him: once you have written for a living it is simply impossible to stop. Such was the demand for his work that he soon ensured his and Sandy's lives would not be damaged by the crime inflicted on them. With the calmness and determination typical of the heroes and anti-heroes of his fiction, he simply restored order. To his friends, the way he handled the outrage done to him was just another reason to admire him. And in time we realised there was even more to Freddie than met the eye. One of the most memorable episodes in our friendship was when I persuaded him to come up to Cambridge, about a decade ago, to speak to the University Intelligence Seminar about his association with MI6 in the mid-1960s, at the height of the Cold War. Freddie was on a journalistic assignment to Prague; and allowed himself to become, to put it mildly, extremely friendly with a beautiful Czechoslovak woman working for the country's secret service. It didn't seem that Freddie got much out of her, though he ignored the finest journalistic tradition, and did not make his excuses and leave. The audience of immensely serious intelligence experts loved every second. Freddie's last years were overshadowed by Sandy's deteriorating health; although almost a decade his junior, she spent several years in a care home before her death last autumn, by which he was stricken. It was a genuine love match between the two of them, and although Freddie visited her regularly he was manifestly distressed by their forced separation. They had by then moved from Hertfordshire to Buckinghamshire; and he got into the habit of going to his village pub at lunchtimes; his favourite lunch was a drink and a pork pie. At Sandy's funeral he was heroically brave, and chatted animatedly to his friends in the pub after the service; we all knew what a blow he had suffered, but he appeared to be bearing it stoically. The rapid decline in his health was alarming, and it is almost as though after Sandy's death he lost the will to live. I only heard on Saturday that he was seriously ill; he could not, I was told, see anybody. Nonetheless his death was an inordinate shock. He was a great friend: but more than that, he was a great man and a landmark of our culture.
