32-year-old mother beats her 7-year-old son to death then set his body on fire!

7-year-old Yaseen Ali

A mother brutally beat her seven-year-old son to death with a stick then set his body on fire because he was struggling to commit passages from the Koran to memory, a court was told.

Sara Ege, 32, is alleged to have beaten Yaseen Ali 'like a dog' for failing to recite passages from the religious text, before burning his body at the family home in Cardiff to try and cover up what she had done.

The youngster's death was initially believed to be a tragic accident following the blaze at the house in Pontcanna, until a post-mortem examination revealed Yaseen had died before the fire broke out, Cardiff Crown Court heard.


Ege is also accused of abusing her son in the months leading up to his death, allegedly beating him with a hammer and locking him in a shed for falling behind with his Islamic studies.

The trial at Cardiff Crown Court heard how the university graduate and her husband Yousuf Ege had enrolled Yaseen in advanced classes at their local mosque and hoped he would become Hafiz - an Islamic term for someone who has memorised the Koran.

In a video recording of her interview with police Ege told officers she had set her seven-year-old the target of memorising 35 pages in three months. But the court was told fun-loving Yaseen preferred to play with his friends and fell behind with his learning.

'I was getting more and more frustrated,' Ege said in the interview.

'If he didn’t read it properly I would be very angry - I would hit him. 'But Yaseen wasn’t very good - after a year of practice he had only learned a chapter.”
 
She went on: 'I was getting all this bad stuff in my head, like I couldn’t concentrate, I was getting angry too much, I would shout at Yaseen all the time.

'I was getting very wild - I use to beat him with a stick.' 

The court heard that in the months after Yaseen's death Ege told a doctor she had been told to kill her son by Shaitan - an Islamic name for the devil - and that she felt 100 per cent better after he died.