A young police officer, her hair pulled neatly back, is giving evidence in a murder trial via video link. On the evening of September 2, 2021, in response to a 999 call from a member of the public standing on the Edinburgh landmark Arthur’s Seat, PC Rhiannon Clutton had scrambled through gorse and brambles up the steep slope onto which 31-year-old Fawziyah Javed had fallen.
“She had an obvious injury to her head and she was writhing in pain, but she was able to speak to me when I asked her questions,” Clutton says.
Alex Prentice, counsel for the prosecution, asks what Javed had told her.
“She said, ‘He pushed me,’ ” says the officer, her voice precise and calm. “I asked her who had pushed her and she said, ‘My husband, because I tried to end it.’ ” Silence falls on the courtroom. “She asked me why he treated her like that. She asked me if she was going to die and she asked me if her baby was going to die.”
As dusk turned to night on Arthur’s Seat and the police officer waited for medical help to arrive, she took careful note of the pregnant woman’s testimony. Eventually, Javed lost consciousness. Clutton started chest compressions, but to no avail. It had taken Javed about an hour to die at 10.18pm.
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• Fallen Women review — did they fall or were they murdered?
The recently married solicitor, who was planning to leave her husband, Kashif Anwar, had told another young woman, the first person on the scene, not to let him anywhere near her. What nobody knew on that dark hillside was the scale of abuse Anwar had been inflicting on his wife. Or that, as a lawyer trained in good record-keeping, Javed had documented it.
THE TRIAL OF ANWAR for the murder of his wife was reported daily in the media and his conviction for murder concluded a 20-month Police Scotland investigation. He was sentenced to life. How Javed’s family coped with a high-profile murder trial and how — when there was no forensic evidence — the prosecution succeeded is now the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, The Push.
In England and Wales, filming in court is not allowed. In Scotland, it is, so with the permission of Javed’s family and the Scottish judiciary, Courtroom One at the High Court in Edinburgh had cameras installed, which filmed every moment of the trial. Only the jury is not shown.
What this means is that we gain an insight into how a case is built against a man who may well have thought he would get away with murder.
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Women seem to fall from heights with remarkable frequency, often in the presence of men who are known to be abusive. Some falls are initially viewed by the police as suspicious. Arrests are made, but charges are rarely brought. If a woman is pushed, there is unlikely to be much, if any, forensic evidence linking the perpetrator to the crime. Any ante-mortem injuries from an assault in the moments before are frequently masked by the devastating physical trauma caused by falling from a height. It is unlikely, if a domestic altercation is taking place indoors, that there will be any eyewitnesses. If the setting is outdoors, a killer is likely to choose a remote location. If the victim does survive, they are likely to be so brain damaged that their evidence can be challenged — if, that is, they still have the ability to communicate.
Detective Inspector Bob Williamson was in charge of inquiries into Javed’s fall. “Deaths like hers are very difficult to investigate,” he says. “When there is only one person who truly knows what happened and they choose to lie, the investigation then relies on largely circumstantial evidence.” His approach was to gather all the circumstantial evidence, including “movements before, during and after of any person involved, no matter how small a part they play or how little they seem involved, as well as analysis of devices linked to the victim or suspect. We build as detailed a picture as possible to identify inconsistencies that might provide an indication of someone trying to hide something from us.”
The forensic criminologist Dr Claire Ferguson, who researches concealed homicides at Queensland University of Technology, has done an in-depth analysis of 12 fall deaths that resulted — some several years after the event — in a murder conviction. She explains that while most of those prosecutions were based on evidence of planning, the three killings that were spontaneous “look like other domestic violence-related homicides. They involve threats of separation or actual separation. They are very angry and the offender is trying to regain control and throws the person usually off a balcony, rather than some wilderness location.”
During the trial, Anwar’s defence relied on his account that he had slipped and accidentally pushed his wife over the edge. On the face of it, this is a plausible explanation. So how much weight can be attributed to the word of a dying woman who may have perceived a stumble as a deliberate push?
“This was a very real aspect of this investigation,” Williamson says. “I cannot overstate the importance of Fawziyah telling the first witness and then the first officer what had happened. Given what she said and mentioning their previous history, I placed huge significance on her words. At no time did Fawziyah mention a fall or slip.”
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Ferguson’s research shows there is usually an argument in the moments immediately before a fall homicide that is not pre-planned. “You often have witness statements saying [there was] yelling and screaming in the apartment,” she says. “And generally the woman is attempting to or actually leaving in those moments, or has threatened to leave, and that’s the trigger for homicide.” She observes that throwing a woman from a balcony or other high place “might be the first instance of known physical violence, but the relationships are abusive and controlling for a period of time leading up to that. The separation is the final point.”
EARLY IN THE TRIAL, Fawziyah’s mother, Yasmin Javed, is called to the stand. “Did you have a daughter, Fawziyah?” the prosecuting advocate, Prentice, asks her.
The horror of the past tense catches her and at first she can only nod, before whispering, “That’s right.”
“Were you close to your daughter?”
Yasmin nods again, her voice low. “Very close. She was an only child.”
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Javed, whom phone footage shows as a young woman who was bubbly and brilliant, had become frightened of her husband and was about to leave him, her mother tells the jury. They had planned for her to move back home the minute she returned to Leeds from the Edinburgh trip. They would celebrate her 32nd birthday together on September 4, knowing that finally she was safe. Javed was also newly pregnant, another known risk factor for domestic homicide when a woman is being abused. As the trial progresses, despite the lack of forensics, the evidence of Anwar’s escalating abuse towards his wife begins to stack up.
A recording Javed made on her phone in April 2021 of two calls with her husband is played in court. “Who the f*** do you think you are?” Anwar says viciously on the first one. “You’re a disease in everyone’s life. The sooner you’re dead or the sooner you’re out of my life, it’ll be better.” On the next call, the same evening, Javed pleads, “‘Do I not have a say in how I want my life with you?”
“You’re being a bitch,” her husband tells her. “Why the f*** are you not listening to me? You’re not a man, so start behaving like a woman. Why the f*** did you decide to ruin my f***ing life? I tell you one thing — you end this and I’ll ruin yours. You know what, Fawziyah? I mean it.” The same night, her mother calls the police and Javed makes her first official report of domestic abuse.
Has her husband ever laid a hand on her, she is asked by the officers who attend. He had put a pillow on her face and punched her through it, she tells them. The officer informs her it is assault, but she does not want her husband charged.
Next, there is CCTV footage of Anwar swerving his car across a road to mount the pavement as Javed walks along it. He leaps out, wrestles her against the car door, then chases and grapples with her as she tries to get away.
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Another piece of evidence: Javed rings a divorce lawyer and saves the recording she makes of the call. When it is played, you can hear she is crying.
A witness travels up from Leeds to explain how, at an antenatal appointment, just a few days before the fall, she was in the next bed to Javed. She heard Anwar calling his wife “a bitch” and saying “repeatedly that he should never have married her and that if one of them died during childbirth, that would be good”. The woman breaks down. “I was really scared,” she says. “I was really, really worried for her safety.”
NATASHA RATTU, chief executive of the charity Karma Nirvana, which helps victims of “honour” abuse, has supported Yasmin and her family since Javed died and sat through every day of the trial. She sees clear indicators that “honour” was a factor in Anwar’s abuse of his wife. “The shame element that was brought up, the fact that he kept saying she would never leave him and that she was told divorce was not acceptable in his family, these are all pointing towards her killing being an honour-based crime,” she says.
Yasmin contacted Karma Nirvana’s helpline under a pseudonym in the May before her daughter died. “Our call handler noted she had concerns about her son-in-law and about his parents, who she said didn’t like Fawziyah talking to anyone about her marriage issues because of the shame,” says Rattu. “They threatened to tarnish her reputation in the community, using that notion of honour.” Karma Nirvana is now calling for a statutory definition of honour-based abuse, a recommendation that was first made by parliament’s women and equalities committee last year, but was rejected by the government.
With Javed’s killing, the decision was taken to prosecute the crime as a domestic abuse case, not as an honour case. Given that plenty of evidence of coercive control and escalating abuse could be presented in court, the prosecution was concerned that introducing the honour element might distract a jury.
Anwar’s father told the film-makers that his son and Javed had “a love marriage” and “they were always happy”. He said, “In all marriages there can be friction and tension between couples, but to claim that there was any abuse of any form or that we had any indication of this is totally false.”
MY RESEARCH INTO THIS SUBJECT, with Gemma Newby for Tortoise Media, showed that,of the 51 female falls we found in our investigation, 27 were deemed suspicious by police. Out of those, 21 arrests were made. Charges were brought in six and convictions secured in five. And of the 17 deaths? Two convictions for manslaughter and one for murder.
Since I published Fallen Women, which focused on the death of Bianca Thomas, 25, in Birmingham — a man was arrested on suspicion of murder, then released — there has been the murder conviction for Javed’s death and a manslaughter plea deal in the case of Kathleen John, 39, who fell from a third-floor window in 2022, moments after her known abuser, Leonidas Georgalla, assaulted her. She left bloodied fingerprints on the windowsill as she tried to escape. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison, with another five on licence. The partner of Shannon Beirne, 25, who in 2022 fell 13 floors to her death in Bristol, was arrested for murder and was under investigation for six months. No file was presented to the Crown Prosecution Service, despite evidence that Beirne planned to leave, an altercation earlier that evening that police had attended and a phone call her boyfriend made to Beirne’s mother minutes before she arrived at his flat saying, “I’m sorry, I know she’s your daughter, but I’m going to kill her.” The man maintains his innocence. The police said officers carried out a “thorough and comprehensive” investigation into her death and there was no evidence of third-party involvement.
I MET YASMIN JAVED LAST YEAR, at a protest for women killed by men. On a cold, grey morning, she stood staring at a placard made for her daughter. It had been driven into the ground alongside scores of others, each designed to signify a grave-marker. Her husband, Mohmmad, sat silently. It was seven months since the trial. Losing her only child, and the only grandchild she will ever have, seemed to have physically slowed Yasmin with the sheer weight of grief, but she talked to MPs, trying to get across the warning she is desperate for women to hear — and the reason why she took part in the film.
“Fawziyah was articulate, clever, strong-minded,” she says. “And very intelligent and financially independent. She had the full support of her parents. She had somewhere to go. A lot of women in these situations don’t have anything like that. Fawziyah did and she was making plans to leave him, so if it can happen to her, it can happen to absolutely anybody. Nobody is immune from this.”
The Push: Murder on the Cliff is on Channel 4 on March 3 and 4 at 9pm. Karma Nirvana’s Push for Change campaign calling for a statutory definition of honour-based abuse launches on International Women’s Day, March 8
