- Friday, April 19, 2024
By: Chandrashekar Bhat
TIKTOK influencer Mahek Bukhari’s mother Ansreen denied having seen her former lover’s car leave the road during a hot chase last year.
Saqib Hussain and his friend Hashim Ijazuddin, both aged 21, were killed after their Skoda Fabia was hit by one of the two cars pursuing the duo near the Six Hills junction on the A46 on February 11, 2022.
Ansreen, Bukhari and six others, all on board the two cars following the Fabia from Leicester, have been charged with murder.
Ansreen, 47, has previously admitted to having been in a brief physical relationship with Hussain and accused him of trying to blackmail her. But she denied having bumped him off to keep their affair secret.
During the ongoing retrial – the original trial at Leicester Crown Court was scrapped in December due to “jury irregularity” – she said she had her head down during the hot chase and did not see the Fabia leave the road.
When prosecutor Collingwood Thompson KC asked her: “Are you telling this jury you saw absolutely nothing of the Skoda leaving the road?” she answered in the negative.
Ansreen said when she saw the burning wreckage of the Fabia on her way back towards Leicester, she thought the car must have “lost control”.
The defendants allegedly lured Hussain of Banbury, Oxfordshire, and his friend to Leicester for a meeting in a Tesco car park before the chase for the Fabia began.
Thompson said Hussain had realised the car park meeting was a “trap” because there were more people than he thought.
But Ansreen denied her former lover had been “set up” or she had any plan to harm him. She also said Bukhari had not threatened to have Hussain killed.
When the prosecutor brought up a 999 call in which Hussain had said people inside two cars were trying to ram him off the road, she said she just wanted to speak to him.
“I just don’t know why he’s not stopping, he’s come all that way, I’ve come all that way and it just needed to be sorted,” she told the jury.
