THE mother of a woman pushed to death by her controlling husband in Edinburgh said her daughter’s last words expressing fear of death continued to haunt her.
Fawziyah Javed, 31, an employment lawyer from Leeds, died after falling off a rocky cliff at Arthur’s Seat in the Scottish capital on September 1, 2021.
Her “abusive” husband Kashif Anwar claimed during the murder trial that he had bumped into her while taking a selfie which resulted in her fatal fall. In April this year, Anwar, a West Yorkshire optician, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for causing the death of his wife and her unborn child. Javed was 17 weeks pregnant when her end came.
Javed’s mother Yasmin said her daughter’s last words to her were: "Am I going to die? Is my baby going to die?”
"The words go round around my head every single day," Yasmin Javed told BBC Newsnight.
Kashif Anwar (Image credit: Police Scotland)
An “evil, jealous and insecure" Anwar did not like Javed being independent and having “her own voice” and “her own opinions”, she said adding he had told her daughter to stop behaving like a British woman.
Javed, who had worked with Lyons Davidson Solicitors, married Anwar in December 2020, having met him while accompanying Yasmin to buy glasses.
But Anwar was accused of subjecting her to verbal abuse and preventing her from communicating with her family and friends. He allegedly tried to control his wife and warned her against seeking a divorce.
The couple hosted a reception in Leeds before travelling to Edinburgh where they checked into Residence Inn by Marriott a day before her untimely death.
Yasmin said her daughter approached lawyers to end the marriage and made voice recordings of Anwar being “abusive” and “threatening” her but he “always” told Javed that he was “never” going to divorce her.
In one of the recordings, he could be heard saying, “You end this and I will ruin yours”.
In another audio, Anwar tells Javed, "Who do you think you are? You're not a man…"
Yasmin quoted him as telling his wife that divorces were against his family’s tradition and that “we stay in marriages no matter what."
