Council told to disclose 24,000 pages of Sara Sharif files

A coroner leading the inquest into the death of Sara Sharif has ordered Surrey County Council to disclose more than 24,000 pages of documents.

Sara, 10, was found dead at her family home in Woking, with her father Urfan Sharif and stepmother Beinash Batool jailed for life in 2024 for murder.

A pre-inquest review heard that the inquest, originally scheduled for April, will be pushed back by a further six months to October 2027.

The eight-week inquest will examine what state agencies knew, or ought to have known, about Sara's safety before she was murdered.

At the hearing in Woking on Thursday, senior coroner Richard Travers told the county council that he wants "all of the pages" to be disclosed to him by 2 October.

He said he would call the local authority's chief executive Terence Herbert to appear before the court if he did not have them.

Alethea Redfern, representing the authority, argued against the full disclosure of the documents, saying that many were "irrelevant" to the inquest.

But Travers said he does not understand what the council's "issue" was with him obtaining the files.